[Gllug] Getting technical about email

[Mike Brodbelt]

John G Walker wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 09 Nov 2006 19:34:45 +0000 Mike Brodbelt
> <mike at coruscant.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> 
>> Martin A. Brooks wrote:
>>> On Thu, 2006-11-09 at 16:42 +0000, John G Walker wrote:
>>>> What I need is to understand how an email server would work. I've
>>>> really got to know this before I can design the optimal setup.
>>> IMAP is your friend.  Have all you mail delivered to your IMAP
>>> server (Cyrus, for example), and users pick up their mail from one
>>> place.
>> Indeed - IMAP simplifies things a great deal.
>>
>> You basically need to choose an MTA to do all the SMTP stuff for you,
>> and then pick a storage format. Simplest case would be local delivery
>> to plain old MBOX, then read your mail with mutt or something. A
>> better option would be to have your store served up with POP or IMAP
>> - IMAP being the preferred option.
> 
> MTA? This is why I think I need to read "Email servers for dummies" or
> something.

Mail Transport Agent - a daemon that handles SMTP, basically. There are
a number, but you should probably limit yourself to one of sendmail,
Postfix, or Exim. If you have no particular reason to prefer any one
over the others, use the default one that comes with your distribution.

>> [snip} you'll have to plan in order to make
>> sure all the pieces fit together happily.
> 
> This is why I think I need to know what I'm doing before I do it.
> Otherwise I can see myself getting cut off from the world - and the
> existing situation is way better than that!

As a baseline setup - start with whicever MTA your distro used, and have
it do it's own local delivery, which is likely to be the default. Then
install the UWash IMAP server, which will make your mbox mailboxes
available over IMAP. If your mail comes in to a POP3 mailbox, use
fetchmail to pull it down and pass it off to your local MTA. Once you've
got the hang of all that you can consider more featureful MTA setups,
and full featured IMAP servers like Cyrus.

Mike
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