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

From: Jef Driesen (jefdriesen_at_hotmail.com.nospam)
Date: 10/07/05 

Date: Fri, 07 Oct 2005 07:50:24 GMT

Michael Perry wrote:
> On Thu, 06 Oct 2005 15:04:42 +0200, Jef Driesen wrote:
>
>
>>snipped a bit off the top <
>
>
>
>>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.
>
>
> Jef-
>
> It sounds like you have a very good plan overall for a local mail
> server. Here is what I do just as a comparison point. I have two
> domains to get mail for (one work and one home) that fetchmail grabs for
> me. Both are contained in one system fetchmailrc here on regular old
> debian unstable. Both go to the same account but what I do after that
> is filter mail based on from and to addresses using procmail to other
> folders. I am using dovecot imap and postfix here and I also have a
> number of home systems that run a variety of things but this one mail
> server does all the smtp sending for me here. My ISP and work use
> spamassassin to filter off bad stuff so I don't run spamassassin here at
> all. I think about 95% of the spam gets trapped at my ISPs mail server.

Well, i took my time to study the postfix and fetchmail documentation
before trying it out. Local delivery is already working fine, but
sending to the outside world does not work all the time. I think it is
related to the fact i don't have a real hostname. Some emails are
rejected by my ISP relayhost. Could you post (or mail, remember to
remove the .nospam in that case) your postfix configuration files as a
starting point for me?

For the procmail filtering, will the mail from each isp account appear
in a subfolder of your one user? Because i prefer to keep them
completely separated (each with his own Inbox, Trash, Send,...) and
username/password combination.

For the IMAP server I haven't decided between courier or dovecot yet.
For the moment, I just followed the instructions on
http://users.pandora.be/feys/html/en/docs/docimap.html and it work out
of the box. But I want to finish the postfix and fetchmail part before
configuring an imap server.

> One of the interesting points is what I do when I travel. Since my mail
> is situated completely privately here behind a linksys router and not
> exposed whatsoever to the outside, I implemented openvpn on the box so
> when I am on the road I just tunnel in over ssl vpn and read my mail
> using the same client all the time. This works very well for me and
> since the server box also runs samba, I can see network shares on my XP
> laptop very easily. On my debian laptop it all works the same too.
> Openvpn is very easy to setup for this kind of use and its a very active
> and well developed and maintained project.

My machine is also running behind a (d-link) router and my isp blocks
all incoming traffic on ports below 1024. The openvpn idea sounds
interesting, but my server is not running all the time.

> I personally prefer dovecot imapd on debian since it will use either mbox or
> maildir folders very easily. I've used the same approach for some years
> now and it works very well from coffee shops, motels, whatever. I also
> like postfix quite a bit here.

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