Consolidated eMail Server

Craig White craig at tobyhouse.com
Mon Apr 21 16:59:39 UTC 2008


On Mon, 2008-04-21 at 12:35 -0400, Gene Poole wrote:
> Group,
> 
> I've got a small network of computers at home and over time I've
> accumulated several email addresses (actually 8 email addresses).  I would
> like to automate getting all of the mail from these various locations and
> place them on my server running Fedora 8 and use it as my 'consolidated'
> mail server.  I would then like to read my mail from any of the machines
> without downloading the mail to that machine (in other words leave the mail
> on my 'consolidated' mail server).  Does anyone know of a way to do this?
> Can this be done?
----
sure...

the first thing you need to do is to designate one machine as your 'mail
server'. This machine needs to have:
- smtp/mta software such as postfix or sendmail
  probably also needs to use a 'smarthost' mechanism for outbound mail
- imap server such as dovecot or cyrus-imapd
- fetchmail to get mail from the various accounts
- I would probably toss in something like amavisd-new or MailScanner, to
integrate spamassassin and clamav scanning of incoming e-mail.

The process for retrieving e-mail is:
fetchmail retrieves e-mail from various accounts. This email is passed
to your MTA (scanned by spamassassin/clamav) and delivered to the user
account (your imap server handles end delivery)

The process for using e-mail is to have your mail clients
(thunderbird/kmail/evolution/whatever else) to get mail via IMAP.

IMAP has folders but the e-mail all stays on the 'mail server'. IMAP
also keeps track of attributes such as 'Seen/Replied To' etc. via IMAP
'flags' so that if you have read the e-mail on one computer, it shows up
as read in any other computer.

Outbound mail would also use this 'mail server' for sending e-mail which
would then relay through your 'smarthost'.

You might ultimately want to consider using a Web based e-mail package
to read your e-mail when you are not home too.

Craig




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