[olug] Email server

[Nick Walter]

Your plan seems technically sound but it might be too much effort and
money expended in the wrong direction.  Especially considering it is
only 4 PCs.

You have 4 PCs with no backup in place.  You have, according to your
e-mail, a backup server capable either running on windows or on *nix
with samba available.  My recommendation would be to mount the 4 PC's
hard drives via smb to the backup server and back them up.  Not only
will you be backing up the outlook.pst file (for e-mail safety) but the
rest of the HD as well in case a restore of other critical stuff is
needed.

My usual recommendations to people worried about being unable to work
because e-mail is gone is to set their POP3 client to leave e-mail on
server for 5 days or so.  

If you do all the above, and the general managers computer crashes
again, he/she could continue working through 3 stages of degraded e-mail
availability.

1.)  Immediately using a temporary PC to access his/her last 5 days of
e-mail.

2.)  Once a restore of outlook.pst file completes, all e-mail is
avilable on the temporary PC.  Restore can also make available critical
stuff from "My Documents" and so forth.

3.)  Once original PC is repaired, it can be restored from backup and
then the newer outlook.pst and any other new data from the temp PC can
be copied to the original PC.

Nick Walter


On Wed, 2004-01-14 at 11:36, Eric Penne wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 
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