Re: Help with email setup for small network (imap)

From: Jef Driesen (jefdriesen_at_hotmail.com.nospam)
Date: 10/06/05 

Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2005 15:04:42 +0200

Jef Driesen wrote:
> At home, I have a small network of 2 computers (and maybe a few more in
> the future) connected to a cablemodem. Now I'm using Mozilla Thunderbird
> to access the mailboxes from my ISP (POP3 only). The problem with my
> current setup is that the messages and addressbooks are not synchronized
> on both computers.
>
> I did some research and i think my best option is to setup a local IMAP
> server. But there seems to be so many choices, that I get complete lost.
> Can anyone give me some advise on the different imap servers (courier,
> cyrus and maybe others)? Is there some good documentation about email in
> linux in general? Do I need all those things like postfix, sendmail,
> qmail, fetchmail,...?
>
> For the addressbook, I'm going to use openldap. I already found a nice
> guide for that at
> http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/03/27/ldap_ab.html.
>
> I'm not an experienced linux user, but I don't mind experimenting.

Thanks everyone for your reply. I'm starting to understand now how email
delivery works in linux. For the moment I'm experimenting and reading
more documentation. I already have a more or less working configuration
now, but i would like to get some advice. I'm using ubuntu 5.04.

For retrieving mail from my 3 remote POP mailboxes, I'm using fetchmail
with the following configuration:

set daemon 60 # Background poll interval in seconds
set syslog # Error logging through syslog
set postmaster localuser1 # Name of the last-resort mail recipient

# Leave messages on server and
# use UIDL to track read messages.
poll smtp.isp1.be with protocol POP3 uidl
        user "user1" with password "xxx" is "localuser1" here keep
        user "user2" with password "xxx" is "localuser2" here keep
poll smtp.isp1.be with protocol POP3 uidl
        user "user3" with password "xxx" is "localuser3" here keep

I have a system wide /etc/fetchmailrc which is working fine. Is there an
advantage in using separate files for each user? And what if localuser2
does not have an account on the server (person will use my account to
login, but mail must stay separated) and localuser3 is not even a
physical person (but an organization for which i send/receive mail)?

For mail delivery I have chosen for postfix (default for ubuntu). I have
one server (called manta) which should do local delivery and forward
other mail to my ISP. Other clients (called shark) on the network can
access the mail on the server over IMAP and forward outgoing mail to my
server. (At least i think this is the kind of setup i need.) Based on
the documentation of
http://www.postfix.org/BASIC_CONFIGURATION_README.html and
http://www.postfix.org/STANDARD_CONFIGURATION_README.html, I created the
following /etc/postfix/main.cf:

# Host and domain name.
myhostname = localhost.localdomain
#mydomain = localdomain

# Domain name to use in outbound mail.
# (send mail as "user@$myhostname")
myorigin = $myhostname
#myorigin = $mydomain

# Domains for local delivery, instead
# of forwarding to another machine.
mydestination = $myhostname localhost.$mydomain localhost

# Authorized client networks.
# Relay mail from trusted networks
# to any remote destinations.
mynetworks = 127.0.0.0/8 192.168.0.0/24
# Never relay mail from untrusted networks.
relay_domains =

# Indirect delivery via a relay host.
relayhost = [uit.telenet.be]

# Postmaster alias.
# See file /etc/aliases

# Network interface addresses
inet_interfaces = all

Because i don't have a valid domain name, I'm using the mapping
described in the postfix documentation:

# Host without a real Internet hostname.
# Map local addresses to valid ISP addresses.
canonical_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/canonical
# Deliver mail for ISP addresses locally.
virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual

Seems like not having a real hostname is the most difficult part. At
least i'm having some trouble here.

For the imap server I'm trying courier-imap, but all subfolders (Trash,
Send,...) are displayed inside the inbox. Is there a way to change that
behaviour? Maybe it's in the documentation, but i didn't looked at it
very carefully yet, because I'm still working on my postfix setup.

In the future, i would like to add spam and virus filtering. But for
now, my goal is to have a working setup.

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