Jimmy Bradley wrote: > Hi guys, > I realize that this might be considered to be off topic, but the > machine I want to use is running Cent OS. > 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? By default, you got MTA daemon (sendmail) installed on the system. All that you need to do is to configure it to accept mail from network. Install sendmail-cf and sendmail-doc RPMs. You need former to reconfigure sendmail. The later is documentation. Lot of usefull docs at www.sendmail.org too. An alternative to sendmail is postfix. It is somewhat easier to configure, apperently. Postfix is also distributed with CentOS, but not installed by default. Once you configure sendmail to accept email from network (by default it is configured not to even allow connections from remote hosts), you'll need a way to enable email clients to fetch email that is stored on the server. There are two IMAP/POP servers distributed with CentOS. The first is called Dovecot. It is very basic, easy to understand and configure. It has all the features that average users needs from IMAP server. The second option is Cyrus. It is fully fleged, state of the art IMAP server. For experienced folks. Can be non-trivial to configure, requires more administrative work than Dovecot, and you'd also need to reconfigure sendmail (or postfix) specifically to work with Cyrus. My personal preference is Cyrus. If you had some previous experience with this kind of stuff, I'd probably try to interest you into it too. However, since you obviously have no experience with email servers, I'm going to recommend Dovecot to you. Cyrus only if you have extremely steep learning curve or if you are mazohist, or both ;-)