Mail server fun

[altaire64]

Well, I got courier installed and started on my webserver, but I'm somewhat confused as to its setup. If anyone knows how to set up courier, or knows of an easier imap mail server to use, please let me know. I'm gonna go read more documentation while I wait for an SQL job to finish.

Comments

[softlydarkness]

I are smrt. But I don't know a thing about what you just said :P

[altaire64]

I really don't know what I said either, I'm only smart at work. Off the clock means I become dumb and lazy again.

[shippo]

Ping me sometime this evening; I do courier/felchmail/Exim at home, and courier/fetchmail/procmail at work. Depending on what you're trying to do, I might be abe able to help or I may have config files you can use.

[altaire64]

I'm looking to set up a mail server on a gentoo box that's just running apache right now. I like imap better than pop3, so I'm trying to get courier's imap daemon to work. Basically I want to have a mail address I can rely on, as msoe is really fucking me in an uncomfortable manner.

[shippo]

Well, if you actually want to handle your own mail reception, courier-imap is kinda useless for that. All Courier does is make e-mail files that are already on your machine available to remote hosts via IMAP.

If you want your computer to be able to receive e-mail, you'll need a MTA on your machine. The popular ones are Sendmail, PostFix, and Exim. Sendmail is all kinds of fucking awful and Postfix is supposedly pretty easy to configure. I use Exim, because it's Debian's default MTA, but I don't use it for receiving e-mail.

I use fetchmail to fetch mail from external pop3 servers (e.g. MSOE and a few addresses associated with my domain) and deliver it to my internal MailDir. Actually receiving e-mail on your own machine requires work, and I'm too lazy to do that.