Mail on LAN?

[owemeacent]

I'm trying to setup a local mail server for my schools computer lab so I can send all the users on all the different computers. The problem is I'm not sure how it works. I don't want to do a bunch on domain name things and all that stuff I'm just going to use hostnames. Like "ServAdmin" and stuff like that. I know that it "should work" because I ping the computer just by their host names on LAN. I know how to use postfix on my local computer. Like "mail root" or stuff like that. I know that when I type in

[eccerr0r]

Since you admin all of those computers, I think you'll find it best to use one centralized mail server and not keep mail accounts on individual machines. While you can setup smtp on every machine, it's best to just run a mail server on a single machine and have all other machines use POP or IMAP or something to check mail on the centralized machine (or if you're really lazy, force them to login to the centralized machine). This way people won't have to worry about mail being on a specific machine.

Otherwise I thought that with the default sendmail setup, postfix may be similar, should just work. However I do know that sendmail depends a lot on DNS being set correctly to help reduce mail forgery risks. You don't have to have external IP addresses but the DNS server needs to know all machines. I don't know if postfix has the same security or not but I assume it does.

I do recall misconfiguring sendmail once assuming that DNS was not necessary, and generated an unintentional mail loop that took down a network... ha.
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What am I supposed watching?

[owemeacent]

Yea, that's what I meant, to only have one server that would send to a bunch of computers without them being able to send back

[szatox]

that's opposite to what you ment. eccerr0r suggests you keeping mails at a single machine. Actualy you don't even have to "send" that mail in this case, just move it between local accounts on a single server and have users login there to send or receive messages just like they would do with any mail service provided by third party.You are just less likely to encountere spam problems as long as you keep it local (like in local to your LAN)
SMTP and POP or IMAP would allow users to cave mail client application do the sending and checking for them in transparent manner (once configured with account details ofcourse)

[owemeacent]

May I ask how can you do that?