Re: Need Help Configuring LAN for Email

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Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 22:28:47 +0100

In message <jbae22-1p6.ln1@charon.markhobley.yi.org>, Mark Hobley
<markhobley@hotpop.deletethisbit.com> writes
>I need help setting up my small network of machines to receive email.
>
>My email goes to a mailbox on the internet. I want one of my machines (the
>"server") to retrieve this email and hold it in a mailbox.
>
>I want to be able to read the email held on the server from a remote client
>machine.
>
>I am not fully sure what I am doing here, but I want to use the "mutt" mail
>client on the remote machine.
>
>I'm not sure what I need on the server, but I believe that "exim" may
>be one of
>the packages for the job.
>
>Do I need also need "fetchmail" on the server?
>
You don't say which Linux distribution you have in mind, if any. Exim is
the default mail server for Debian, but possibly not for any other
distribution. You can install it on any Linux distribution, but Debian
will configure it easily. Mail servers are not trivial programs to
configure.

Fetchmail is fairly simple to understand, as it does a much more limited
job.

>Does the remote client need any other packages? Remember I want the mail to
>remain in a mailbox on the server on my LAN.
>remain on the server.

This means that either you use the IMAP protocol, which does this kind
of thing and more, or you use POP3 and configure the client not to flush
messages after download. I believe mutt can use either protocol, so you
just need to ensure that the server runs the appropriate server
software. IMAP, as implied, is much more powerful and flexible. About
the only control you have with POP3 is whether to flush all the messages
or not. I'm fairly sure you can't delete individual messages.
>
>How do I configure this lot ?

That is very distribution- and application-specific. Exim under Debian
uses a simple questionnaire, which should cover your needs. Fetchmail
more or less needs only the ISP details. Installing either a POP3 or
IMAP server under Debian does not, I think, need any configuration. If
you use IMAP, I think you need to change the type of mailbox storage
that exim defaults to, but as I recall that is all.

There is a choice of IMAP server. I use Courier, there are at least two
others, and I'm sure other people will offer opinions on them.
>
>I would like system mail messages to be forwarded to the central server
>in future. How can I achieve this?

In general, you configure logging on the client software with the name
of a mailbox on the server, you make sure the server will accept email
from these clients, and either the mailbox is you or there is an alias
to you. For example, a lot of system email is sent to root, but the
usual advice is to set an alias of root (and postmaster) to a real
person, and not to actually access mail while logged in as root. The
exim configuration actually asks for this alias specifically.

Configuration is very specific to the exact software involved. For use
with fetchmail, exim would only need to accept mail from localhost i.e.
the server itself, but for remote logging it must accept mail from
wherever the logs originate. It's not too difficult, and the
configuration file /etc/exim/exim.conf contains a lot of documentation.

You can certainly do what you want, but you probably need to get your
hands metaphorically dirty with configuration information for the
software you need to use. The information is all there in man pages and
the exim specification, but you may need to learn some new concepts.

-- 
Joe

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