Need email relaying howto

[Jeffrey F. Bloss]

Yagnesh Desai wrote:

> Friends
> I have an account with ISP who provided pop3 email
> account. Now I have 10 accounts there and
> 10 people in my intrAnet are  accessing these mails
> via M$Outlook (I can not help this). while I do it with Evolution.
> 
> I want to setup a server which fetches these mails and
> keep backup of them, and also serve to all 11 of us and
> we still use our own mail client while there is always backup
> of those mail in the server. . .

Here's a page from a broader "how to" that gives step by step
instructions for setting up Postfix with SASL authentication and TLS
encryption for outgoing mail, and Courier for the POP/IMAP access
you'll need for users' mail clients to connect to and retrieve
incoming mail...

http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_ubuntu_6.06_p5

There's certainly other options. Different software like Exim mail
server and Dovecot POP/IMAP, but this will give you a good overview.
I'd say 95% of it is relevant to your question in any case. Since
you're planning on ultimately removing your ISP from the loop you'll
want a full blown mail server, and all the extra encryption and
authentication stuff makes it safe to use from the outside in case
someone with a laptop needs remote mail access or such. It doesn't hurt
anything to have it running even on an internal network either. ;-)

In addition to this, you'll need something to get mail from your ISP's
mail server to yours. That's a pretty easy one... Fetchmail. It will
poll your ISP mail server at scheduled intervals and hand mail off to
Postfix, which will deliver it to the users' mailboxes on your server,
that Courier will happily let them access on request. Outgoing mail
should be routed to your server first for archiving/processing, which
will in turn use your ISP mail server as a "smart host" initially
(until you get to the point you no longer use them for anything at all).

Your archiving requirements I have little experience with, but if you
don't discover a canned solution I'd suggest looking into using Procmail
and some sort of recipe that invokes tar/gz magic to add copies of
everything to your backups automatically. IMAP mail access for users
may help in this respect too, because mail is left on the server by
design. You could also set up each client to "leave mail on the
server", or maybe use Procmail to do some sort of "dual delivery" to
the user's mail box and a hidden "archives" mailbox for each user which
you subsequently back up whatever way suites you best.

You'll want Procmail around anyway, to be the liaison between Postfix
and whatever virus and spam software you'll use. It may not be
necessary at first because your ISP deals with it, but when that's
taken away you'll want something in place so you might as well go ahead
and set it up and iron out all the bugs while it's not mission critical.

The only other thing I can think of you'll want set up is SSH for remote
admin. Even if nothing else is exposed to the public, having this key
resource available from anywhere can save your hide.

-- 
     _ _      Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.
    (o o)         Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
-oOO-(_)-OOo-------------------------------[ Groucho Marx ]---
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