Re: [Sheflug] Local e-mail service

[John Cooper <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2007-03-16 at 16:29 +0000, Peter Humphrey wrote:
> I've been running Gentoo on my LAN for quite a while now, and never bothered 
> to get local e-mail running, but now I think it's time I did.
> 
> I have an AMD64 box dropping nasty packets on the floor, and also acting as 
> a mini name server, a Web proxy, a portage rsync server and a time server. 
> It generates e-mails. My workstation connects to it, and so does my laptop. 
> I want to read all my mail on the workstation, and I don't want to open any 
> routes straight through the firewall. If I want to accept e-mail from my 
> ISP via SMTP, does that mean I have to run something the weight of qmail on 
> both the workstation and the firewall box? Seems a bit excessive.
> 

You may want to check that your ISP allows incoming SMTP connections.
Mine blocks them but if they do then I would use postfix, exim or qmail
to grab the email ( personally I use postfix but they are all good! )
the setup a local imap server, I use dovecot but there are other
options! Then you can use kmail to access this mail. This also allows
you to run a webmail server for when you are out and about, or allow
access from your mobile assuming you are happy to open up some ports in
your firewall! At worst you get the mail backed up on your server and
laptop assuming you have offline IMAP setup. Also if you client supports
it ( Thunderbird does not sure about Kmail) you can use IMAP IDLE to get
the mail "pushed" to your client as soon as it arrives.

john


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