Easiest POP3 Server for 6-10 users? 2

[MikHud]

What would be the best POP3 server for me:-
- small number of users (6-10)
- receive mail for all users thru one POP3 box at our ISP
- sort incoming mail by its 'To' address and put in local POP box
to make the mail available to local W98 Outlook Express clients
- ideally GPL/free or low cost
It is essential that it is EASY to learn/install/administer with little maintenance required! I'm not really interested to know much about how it all works - I just want to get it working and keep it working with the minimum of attention.

Thanx
Mike

 

[bluegroper]

I think fetchmail might be able to cope with all that.
Others will say qmail is much better.
Just do you own google search for many email pop3 servers.

 

[Norwich]

To make it nice and simple, you may want to get an off the shelf implementation like Suse's mail server.

Saying that, it's fairly easy to set up on your own.

First though, is to get an understanding how UNIX based mail works.

The core to any mail system is the MTA (mail transfer agent). This is the application that handles incoming mail, relays it on to othere systems or delivers it locally. There are quite a few MTAs - the most famous and most complex is sendmail - but for a small, simple installation, I would think Postfix would be a good bet. It comes with a lot of sample installations with one that would suit your requirements.



The MTA is not a complete mail server as such (it's the UNIX way - lots of dedicated tools rather than large, multipurpose applications). And because of this, the MTA will just try to deliver local mail 'locally'. Nearly all distributions will have configured the default system to have the MTA to pass local mail to the procmail program. Without additional configureation, it will put user's mail into individual mailboxes.

Once it's on the linux box, you can use a pop3 appliction to make the mail available for remote users - an example of such an application is qpopper.

However, you may want to consider using IMAP4 rather than POP3 (outlook express will handle this fine) - it was designed to superceed POP3 in permenent network installations by keeping the email on the server and only donwloading it to read - rather than POP3 which downloads it permenantly. Check out The University of Washington IMAP server for linux.



As you are not reciving an SMTP feed to push mail into your MTA, you will need the fetchmail program to regularly poll the ISP mail server and pull the POP3 mail down to pass onto the MTA


I assume that as all the mail is in one mailbox on the ISP machine, it's in the format <username>@mycompany.com. Fetchmail treats this as one user so you'll need to set up an additional procmail configuration to filter by the username you want (not too tricky at all).