[Glastonbury] Mail routing on a small network

[graham oxley]

Last week I wrote asking for help delivering and forwarding mail on my home 
network to a Freeserve ISP mailbox. 
Thanks Andy, your reply has pointed me in the right direction.
Here are the gory details

We have three machines. My son runs Win98 (although "Blender" has convinced 
him that dual booting dosent waste disk space), My fast machine dual boots 
between Mandrake 9 and MSNT4 (for Cakewalk primarily). I use the old P200 to 
dial into Freeserve (down the phone line, no contracts, no 24hrs etc), it 
runs RedHat 7.1, KDE, 48Mb ram. 

All three machines are connected together by thin ethernet using one of the 
IP numbers reserved for private networks. We can share directories with each 
other using both samba and NFS. 

+--joe's machine - Win98, IE, Outlook express etc.
|
+--my main machine, Mandrake 9 or NT4
|
+-- gateway machine, P200, RH7.1, serial modem on /dev/ttyS2

IP Masquerading is set up on the P200, so we can all use web browsers.
(Incidentally, it is quicker for my son to access the the internet through 
the P200 than it is directly through his own modem. I geuss its down to those 
CPU cycles.) I have no firewall set up beyond that required to get 
masquerading working. Cookies come through ok, FTP works fine.

I have no "domain" name set up for the local network, probably best since i'm 
not permanently connected, though I'm thinking about calling it "domain.org" 
or something so obviously not real.

incoming mail:
All our incoming mail goes to "username@oxley1165.freeserve.co.uk". I need to 
pull the mail from this box and send out on the lan according to username.

outgoing mail:
I geuss I need a postbox on the gateway for the lan connected machines to 
send mail to, and then forward them from there.

intranet mail:
we don't send many messages between us, but it would be useful. Windows 3.1 
had a nifty feature called WinPopup, but that disappeared in Windows 95, but 
I geuss if a machine is listening for mail, it will get it.. It would ber 
eally neat if our kids computer said "you have mail" when unbeknown to him 
i'd been on line and got his mail for him.

I assume the gateway/mailserver machine will be able to distinguish between 
messages intended for the outside world and local intranet mail. Hence me 
thinking of assigning my network a ficticious domain name. 

I'm sorry if this is going on a bit, I'm really not this thick, but I've got 
a real block on this. Perhaps it's because I don't want to break something 
that sort of works a bit - i mean, i can pull all the mail off freeserve from 
any of the three machines, but then it all ends up in the wrong place. At 
least the mail gets to the house!!!

thanks for listinening -

Graham

PS - I'll try to be there on the 8th, but I'm curious - why is most of the 
time spent on MySQL and PHP. I assume that MySQL is a database server. Surely 
database programming has as much to do with Linux as making a mail-reply-form 
using OpenOffice? Forgive my humble opinions but I find database programming 
even more exciting than HTML. Things that are easy in Windows yet have us 
scratching our heads on Linux - surely that is what this is all about. 
f