Inside firewall mail server questions

[Kurt Granroth]

On Friday 10 January 2003 11:38 pm, Alan Dayley wrote:
> - The mail server uses fetchmail (or a similar tool/function) to ahem..
> fetch the mail.
> - A program like spamanator filters out the garbage.
> - The mail is put in user mail boxes.
> - The client computers retrieve their mail via the POP server.
> - The client computers send mail out via the SMTP server (qmail, I
> think).
>
> Never having done this sort of setup before, I have some questions:
> 1. This server is inside the firewall.  I don't want it as an email
> server on the net.  My ISP can do that.  Fetchmail can handle this,
> correct?

Yeah, no problem at all.

> 2. Any recommendations on spam programs like spamanator? 
> Something better?

SpamAssassin (http://www.spamassassin.org) and Vipul's Razor 
(http://razor.sf.net) are both very common.  In my case, though, a decent 
number of spam got through.  I switched to using bogofilter 
(http://bogofilter.sf.net) and my incoming spam has trickled down to almost 
zero!  It's trivial to setup but takes a bit more time to get going since 
it "learns" what is spam and what is not based on what you tell it.. but 
once it has a good database of what kind of spam you get, it is very 
accurate.

> 3. I have not researched yet what apps do the POP
> function.  Is it the same app as the SMTP function?  What app is a good
> one for this?

On my mail server, I use Courier (http://www.courier-mta.org) as my IMAP and 
POP3 server.  It was easy to setup and handles Maildir mailboxes.  
Apparently, Courier can also do the SMTP part of it, but I didn't do that.  
For the SMTP, I went with exim (http://www.exim.org).  Also very easy to 
setup and has worked perfectly.

> This should be fun!

Yep!
-- 
Kurt Granroth - "KDE -- Conquer Your Desktop"
KDE Developer/Evangelist | granroth@kde.org
http://www.granroth.org  | kurt@granroth.org