Re: [gentoo-user] Local mail server

[Grant Taylor]

On 7/19/20 8:18 AM, Peter Humphrey wrote:
> Afternoon all,

Hi,

> I'd like to set up a little box to be a local mail server. It would
> receive mails from other machines on the LAN, and it would fetch
> POP3 mail from my ISP and IMAP mail from google mail. KMail on my
> workstation would then read the mails via IMAP. That's all. I might
> want to add a few extras later, such as receiving SMTP mail for a
> .me domain I own. My present total of emails is about 4000.

That should be quite possible to do.

IMHO there's not much difference in an internal only and an externally 
accessible mail server as far as the software & configuration that's on 
said server.  The only real difference is what the world thinks of it.

> I used to have a working system on a box that's now deceased
> [1], but in replicating it I'm having difficulty threading my
> way through the mutually inconsistent Gentoo mail server docs,
> omitting the bits I don't need and interpreting the rest. Bits I
> don't need? Database backend, web-mail access, web admin tools,
> fancy multi-user authorisation, any other baroque complexity.

There are a LOT of ways to do this.  You need to pick the program that 
you want to use for various functions:

  - SMTP: Sendmail (my preference), Postfix (quite popular), etc.
  - IMAP: Courier (my preference), Dovecot (quite popular), etc.
  - POP3: Courier, Dovecot (?), QPopper (?), etc.
  - LDA: Procmail (my preference), delivermail, etc.

Pick the programs that you want to run, possibly influenced by what they 
do and don't support to find an overlap that works.  E.g. Maildir used 
to be less well supported than it is today.

You have already indicated that you want to use fetchmail (or something 
like it).

> So I'm asking what systems other people use. I can't be unusual in what
> I want, so there must be lots of solutions out there somewhere. Would
> anyone like to offer me some advice?

I actually think it's more unusual to want to run an email server that 
doesn't receive email directly from the world vs one that does.  But 
whatever you want.

As others have alluded to, sending email may be tricky, but ultimately 
possible to do.  It will have a LOT to do with what domain name you use, 
and if you have your server smart host through something else.

> 1.  Yes, of course I did have backups, but in juggling the media I
> managed to lose them. A world of advice to others: don't grow old.  :)

Oops!



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die