Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:06:13 +0700 (ICT) From: Olivier Nicole <on@cs.ait.ac.th> To: bds@waywood.co.uk Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Gradual move to own mail server - strategy for noob Message-ID: <200706271006.l5RA6DGq033694@banyan.cs.ait.ac.th> In-Reply-To: <46822D9C.3010400@waywood.co.uk> (message from Barnaby Scott on Wed, 27 Jun 2007 10:27:56 %2B0100) References: <46822D9C.3010400@waywood.co.uk>
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> Install Fetchmail to get mail from my various hosted mailboxes Yes. For testing purpose, why don't you create a temporary mail account at your ISP, at yahoo, gmail, etc. provided they have IMAP, and try retreiving emails from that account. > Configure Sendmail, which I accepted as the default mailer Does fetchmail need sendmail? I never used fetchmail, so I am not sure about that one. > Install Procmail to deliver messages in Maildir format (to users' home > directories?) Yes and yes, Courrier IMAP expects the mailbox to be in the user home directory in ~user/Maildir and procmail is a good place to plugin several features for sorting emails. > Install Courier IMAP as the IMAP server Yes As I said, test everything on a temporary email account. When you start deploying it for your users, do not delete the messages from the ISP server while you fetchmail them to your local server, that will avoid messages getting lost: users are very touchy about lost mail. Try to keep long time log of everything, so you can show them thy are complaining for no good reason. One month of /var/log/mailog may be a good start. > Email is downloaded by individual clients from ISP via POP3 - user must > be at specific machine to access their local mail folders. If elsewhere, > they must use webmail, but of course sent messages, replied flags etc > are then inconsistent, besides which messages are only left on the (ISP) > server for a limited time. This would not change, only displace the problm. If you read your email with POP3, you better always use the same machine, because the sent folder is local to the POP3 client machine. > Again, not necessarily now, but when I am fully up and running, run spam > and virus checking (that's done for me now, but inevitably could be > improved on.) Don't wait too much, especially for anti-virus, if you have the feeling that the service provided to you so far is leaking some viruses. If the architecture is Fetchmail/sendmail/procmail, install the amavid plugin while you are building the new infrastructure. Improved antivirus may be a good way to sell the new email procedure to your users (users don't like to change the way they read email, you need incentives :). Spam is touchy question, no one like spam, but every one may have a very different definition of what is spam or not. On this issue, when I started with SpamAssassin, I let the system running for a couple of months, just tagging the spam messages, so people get used to it. Only after that period, I started to quarantine the spam messages. Good luck, email is certainly a big and touchy subject. Olivier
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