Email setup on Multiple clients

[Ian Moore]

Hello,

 I have been helping out in setting up and running a small Edubuntu powered office environment for Birmingham Friends of the Earth in the UK.

 Our email has been happily residing on the Edubuntu server for a couple of months now. My existing problem is in trying to refine it a bit more. Specifically the automatic removal of spam.

 Okay here's an outline of how the email in general is setup.

 P.s The IMAP setup was inherited from the old server which we pensioned off to make way for the Edubuntu system.

 
 Mail Accounts
 POP3
 Our organisation has a single email address which is advertised on our website 'info@'.
 This account also is a catch all account and receives anything else outside our specified mailboxes.
 We also have some emails which we don't advertise 'it@' 'manager@' etc
 
 Server setup
 This runs an IMAP (in maildir format I think) courtesy of Courier
 Fetchmail collects mail from all of the accounts and dumps them all into the same directory
 
 Clients
 We don't have any private emails as such and all of our workstations are configured so that everyone can see all of the emails.
 Thunderbird is the mail client
 There are mailfilters setup for all of the clients thunderbirds which filter off the different emails into the appropriate subfolders

 The above client setup was done as follows.
 1-The basic 'info@' account was created on each of the machines
 2-On the 'server' machine tbird mail subfolders were created and then also 
 3- Multiple identities were created in tbird through the menu for each email address (so you can reply from 'it@' etc
 4- mail filters were setup to take mail from the inbox and place it into the happy employees respective tbird mail folder
 
 Okay so apart from creating a basic tbird setup on each client (imap ipaddress/psswrd/account name etc) the multiple identities,mail subfolders,mail filters were all setup on the server.
 THEN a script was written which copied the .msf and prefs.js files from the server .mozilla-tbird directories out to the clients appropriate home directories.

 This does work successfully and I have managed to add extra email addresses and corresponding mail folders since by updating the script.

 I thought I'd share the above as it took quite a while to come up with a solution which met our needs. Also email setup in general is a bit of a mystery to me.

 My current efforts are in trying to add some automatic spam filtering.
 Tbird does have this facility and I may try and use it. My thoughts on this are that a single  user should log into the 'server' account to read mail first thing in the morning and then mark the mail as spam or not. With the relevant option enabled this would train tbirds 'adaptive junkmail detection'.
 I am guessing that I could then copy the appropriate .dat file (can't remember the exact name but I have seen it) where the learning data is stored out to the other machines.

 I have quickly had a go with spamassassin in a simple setup using the 'spam be gone' python script. (As far as I can gather, the adaptive learning function using spambegone is not accessible because of spambegone's remote way of accessing an IMAP server. This maybe makes it less useful than using tbirds 'adaptive detection')
 Not sure whether I've got it working properly although it churns through the emails without errors. Since I dont really know the deep down workings of email yet I didn't want to try and incorporate spamassassin with Courier in case I broke our email. This would make me quite unpopular!

  My colleagues at work are very happy with the email setup in general, as since we installed the Edubuntu system we have lots of extra email accounts in addition to the original 'info@'. 

 My questions to the forum is -- am I going down the wrong road here? (Although I think it's too late to change now)
 Has anybody tried a similar mail setup ?
 Is there a simple or well suited setup for Edubuntu and email?
 Am I a bit off topic ? I am lacking general knowledge about email setups.

 I guess that Edubuntu is targeted at Educational environments but we are using it as a business office setup. We are very happy with it as we have been using very slow and badly configured old linux boxes up until now. We are a cash strapped organisation.

    Ian Moore