Mail server problem solution?

kukibl · Apprentice Joined: 10 Jun 2008 Posts: 237

The problem is not Gentoo related, but potential solution is.

My company uses 2 e-mail addresses provided by local provider, however mailbox quota is 50 MB. It gets filled up quickly, since we receive lot's of big attachments (mainly drawings) and there is of course - spam. 8 computers (however all of them aren't in the same place, some are remote) out of 15 receive e-mail, so mail must stay on provider's server for at least 7 days before it gets deleted. The problem is it gets full in one-two day(s), so at least once per day someone needs to access server's web interface and free up some space for other mails. I guess you got the idea... Also, provider's spam filer is really primitive and unusable. All computers are running Windows.

My idea is to take some older desktop or maybe even laptop (battery advantage since there are casual electricity instabilities) which is not used anymore and set it to fetch all messages for both e-mail accounts 24/7. Then I would set all e-mail clients to connect to that machine and download messages from it. I would probably keep it at home, since my Internet connection is not much loaded and this way I could keep an eye on it.

But since my network knowledge is quite limited :lol:

, I would like to hear (read) your solution preposition.

Thank you!

Alex

Etal · Veteran Joined: 15 Jul 2005 Posts: 1931

I have a local mail "server" running on my computer. It consists of fetchmail (to fetch mail from pop3 servers), procmail (to put incoming messages into correct directories) and courier-imapd for an IMAP server to connect to with an email client (and of course cron to check periodically). Overall, it was extremely easy to set up.

You can follow this guide for all the steps up to mutt, and then use one of the many courier-imapd set up tutorials to set up the IMAP (or pop3, if you want)

kukibl · Apprentice Joined: 10 Jun 2008 Posts: 237

Thank you very much, AM088! It is exactly what I was looking for and it looks quite simple to setup and use. I'll try to setup it on my machine and test it with one e-mail account for some time and if it all works well, there is no reason not to apply it completely.