[CentOS] OT: question on setting up an email server

[Steve Huff]

On Jun 19, 2005, at 9:59 PM, Jimmy Bradley wrote:

>       Ok, this is what I'm thinking about trying, and mainly just  
> to see
> if I can do it. I've got a total of 3 linux machines here, and I was
> thinking about setting one of them up as an email server. Now, I'm not
> talking about setting the machine up so that all I run on it is an  
> email
> client like thunderbird, or evolution and retrieve email from my email
> account at bellsouth. What I want to try and do is set the machine  
> up so
> that my machine is the email server, and I retrieve my email from it.
> Is what I'm thinking about even possible, or am I just simply having a
> case of too much oxygen on the brain? If what I'm thinking about is
> possible, how would I go about doing it?

since you already have a perfectly good email account at bellsouth,  
unless you want to host email service for your own domain, a full- 
fledged mail server is probably overkill.  i suspect that what you  
want is fetchmail:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/fetchmail/

you configure it with the login information for your bellsouth email  
account and run it as a daemon on one of your CentOS boxes; you then  
run an IMAP service (dovecot, i believe, is the server you'd be  
using) on the CentOS box to serve your mail to your local network.

you'd need some sort of solution for outgoing mail - if you can use  
bellsouth's smtp server for outgoing mail, that would be the simplest.

here's a HOWTO that may be useful:

http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/networking/fetchmail.html

-steve

---
If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an  
improbable fiction. - Fabian, Twelfth Night, III,v