setting up a mail server.

[Steven Stern]

On Thu, 08 Apr 2004 00:05:45 +0100, paul <linux.new at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

>Hi
>  I'm a newbie and need some help in setting up a mail server for my
>local network. i have 5 machines on local network all linked together by
>a hardwire router and connected to the Internet by cable modem
>(telewest). i would like to download all messages to one machine scan
>for virus and spam then forward to others on my network, the messages
>are currently stored by telewest in 5 pop3 mailboxes.
>can someone please help or point me in the right direction. i've tried
>googling but got confused. 
>p.s. 3 of the machines are windows the others are linux fedora.

What's with the .sig?  Registering Linux Users is one step away from making
them illegal.

Anyhow, here's the outline of what you need to do.  It should help focus your
reading.

One machine on your network should be designated the mail server.  It should
be running sendmail to accept incoming messages.  On that machine, use
fetchmail to grab mail from the POP accounts.  Fetchmail can dump the 5 pop
accounts into one account, many accounts, or any combination thereof.

Next, how are you going to serve those messages within your network?  You can
run a POP or IMAP daemon on the mail server and have the other machines then
do normal stuff to get their mail. This is probably the best solution for the
windows machines.  Fedora ships with POP and IMAP clients.  If you want it
treated like "regular unix mail", then you could cross mount /var/spool/mail
(using nfs) from the mail server to the other machines.  Then, mail appears to
be locally delivered to each machine without having to configure any mail
processes on the other systems.

So, to focus your reading, start with the man pages on fetchmail, sendmail
http://www.sendmail.org/m4/readme.html) configuration info, popd, imapd, and
nfs.
--
   Steve