[NTLUG:Discuss] Mail, IMAP, sendmail, fetchmail

[Steve]

nf0 wrote:
> After attending today's meeting, I've decided that I want to setup an IMAP
> mail server at home, and use sendmail and fetchmail. I've never gotten into
> this site of things on Linux before. I've look through the docs and have
> looked online with little help on getting this going. Does anybody have any
> good links or information they would like to share so I can kick off this
> project. I've already gotten all there installed, its configuring them
> that's somewhat confusing.

If you're just doing this for the heck of it, that's fine. But if it's 
because of need (e.g., multiple machines that need a centralized 
solution), you could also consider remotely logging into your mail 
server from your client machines and just using mutt, pine, etc. I went 
with an IMAP solution cuz in our house we like point-n-click for our mail.

I'm using a Debian setup for my mail server.

1) Fetchmail - grabs my mail. There are many fetchmail tutorials on the 
web. Just do a Google search or just start off at fetchmail's home page. 
Here's a link that may help you with Sendmail and Fetchmail together.

http://mercury.chem.pitt.edu/~tiho/LinuxFocus/English/May2000/article130.shtml


2) Exim - Default MTA for Debian,and it seemed fairly well liked for 
speed, size, security, etc. Sendmail just seemed to big for what I 
needed. Just needed to add some modifications to two config groups in 
the conf file (local_delivery, address_directory) to use the Maildir 
format for my Courier IMAP instead of the traditional UNIX 
/var/spool/mail. One not-so-smart thing I did was configure the clients 
to send their mail through my ISP's mail server rather than thru my mail 
server. I'm sure I'll regret it when changing all those client machines 
if my ISP changes its SMTP server.

http://tux.creighton.edu/~pbrutsch/exim.conf


3) Procmail - Server side filtering. No more configuring client side 
email rules/filters for me!

http://mercury.chem.pitt.edu/~tiho/LinuxFocus/English/November1997/article8.html


4) Courier SSL - IMAP server w/ SSL. Only had to change the conf file to 
allow a good number of connections per IP address. Some mail clients 
would get greedy (e.g., Mozilla mail) and after a while, the server 
would stop responding to it. Although I have no clue as to how this 
would scale for a large organization, for a household, I gave each IP 
address a max of 30 connections which was more than enough. I don't 
really need SSL since I'm behind a firewall and it's just for home LAN 
use, but I thought I might as well learn to do it in case I ever want to 
build a remote IMAP server.

I was a total email noob (still am) when I first set this up. My 
approach was to work from the ground up and modularize the approach. If 
you try to build everything up in one day and it doesn't work, sometimes 
it's hard to figure out where the point of failure is. By breaking it up 
into pieces, you can test it out and make sure you're ok before moving 
to the next step. So, in my case....

- Set up Exim for Maildir format.
- Set up Fetchmail and see if I can grab some sample emails to my new 
mail setup. Run it as a daemon and see if it grabs the email on the 
times I told it to.
- Set up Courier. See if I can now see my sample emails via a client 
using IMAP. Build some dummy folders via client.
- Set up procmail on server and see if I can filter new sample emails 
into those dummy folders.

Once I'm sure it's all working ok, I then go about trying to set up my 
real mail folders, real procmail rules, transferring old emails over, etc.

Steve