[olug] Email server

[Eric Penne]

I have an interesting situation that seems to be a big problem for the
company  I'm working for.

They get all their email from Binary.net through POP3.  4 accounts total. 
you all know the problems with POP3 for portability.  They each download
the emails to their PCs.  There is not an individual backup plan for the
individual PCs because nobody understands Outlook well enough to do
anything with it.  The general managers computer crashed Monday and he
can't access his old stuff now until it gets fixed (~1 week).

I suggested that they use a local email server to get their POP3 email. 
Serve it up via IMAP to their local machines.  Then using Samba share that
machines mail folders with the main backup server and do a weekly backup
of the emails.

I'm figuring on using fetchmail for the POP3 side to Binary.net but I
don't have a clue as to what I need on the local side.  I assume I'll need
something like qmail or sendmail to distribute the incoming mail then some
sort of IMAP server to the individual users.

Mostly this is confusion on my part about how the individual pieces fit
together.  I also need reccommendations on a good IMAP server.  I'm pretty
sure I'll use qmail and I see a few programs for IMAP with qmail.

Other options would be to put a spam filter on this IMAP server. 
Something bayes like that would automatically run the false positives and
false negatives every night or every couple of hours as long as they put
them in the appropriate folder.

Does this sound like a reasonable solution?  Is fetchmail, qmail, and
whatever IMAP server very hard to setup?  Would a PIII 700MHz with 128MB
RAM work pretty well for this?

Later
Eric Penne
epenne at ieee.org

PS. I may bring this machine to the installfest with a preloaded distro
(Debian Sid) to see if I can get it setup with all of the gurus around.