[olug] Email server

[Phil Brutsche]

Eric Penne wrote:

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

It's a big problem for most companies until someone shows them IMAP ;)

Where I work we used to use POP3 all the time.  It was a major hassle to
get Netscape to store it's mail folders on a file server to avoid the
problem of "HELP! My PC crashed and took all my email with it!".

> 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.

It sounds like you're going to use IMAP as a POP3 replacement; if that's
the case, why bother?

IMAP is specifically designed to provide server-side mail folders.
Unless they have appointments, task lists, or contacts stored in Outlook
that need to be backed up, trying to get to the Outlook .pst files makes
your whole backup scheme way more complex.

Since you're having Outlook talk to the IMAP server, and their mailboxes
are stored on the mail server, why not just back it up from the mail server?

> 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?

Can't speak for qmail, won't touch that one with a 10 foot pole.

Fetchmail *can* work, but it can be tricky sometimes, and isn't always 
the most robust thing in the world.

Depending on the IMAP server you probably won't need a local MTA - it 
just makes the whole setup more complex.  Fetchmail can call external 
programs to perform the delivery directly: procmail for UW-IMAP (or 
anything else that uses mbox mailboxes); maildrop for Courier (or 
anything else that uses maildir mailboxes); or if you use Cyrus IMAP, 
fetchmail speaks LMTP natively.

> Would a PIII 700MHz with 128MB RAM work pretty well for this?

It depends on how much email they're going to have and the software you
end up using.  With 4 people, each having only a couple hundred messages
among all their mailboxes, it'll be fine.  More memory would not be a
bad idea.

-- 

Phil Brutsche
phil at brutsche.us