[K12OSN] Student email

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2004-12-08 at 16:05, David Trask wrote:

> >But this doesn't satisfy David's criteria that the students be able to 
> >access this from their home.  What he is asking for is a "private/local" 
> >email system that can be accessed by the authorized users (his students) 
> >from anywhere on the Internet. 
> >
> >The private/local part is easy - an SME server with a private IP.  

First you have to decide if you are likely to want any other services
to be public.  The SME server has decent firewalling so if you may
need ftp/web (etc.) access you could use its 2-NIC mode.

> >Access from the outside is the hard part.
> >
> >What about this:  Set up a private SME server as above.  Set up an IP 
> >forward on your firewall that will allow students to get to the private 
> >server from the outside via WebMail.  (Just brainstorming.....)  They 
> >should not be able to mail out since the local server has no public IP 
> >but the students should be able to get to WebMail from outside.

Either way will work, and the SME server has a decent web mail built
in that you can configure to run over http or https only. I'm still
not sure what to expect in the way of updates for SME, though, and
it would only be slightly more difficult to use a stock k12ltsp
server.

It is possible to configure sendmail (not sure about SME's
qmail) to require authentication and even ssl for SMTP and most
mail clients these days have those options. I've only seen that
done to control who can relay mail to non-local addresses but if
you can turn it on for all SMTP access it will do what you want and
you could have your choice of using an IMAP client or webmail.

---
  Les Mikesell
    les at futuresource.com