Mail server setup?

[Joshie the CK]

No NHF on this one, that I could find anyway.. :)

How does one go about setting up the mail server on one's box to be able to interact with the outside world?
It works just snazzy for sending messages to other users on the box, although a bit slow.

Any good sites/howto's to read that're good for helping to understand exactly how a mail server works, and what you need, etc?

Thanks muchly. :D

[Dru Lee Parsec]

It depends on the email program you're using. I use KMail because it can search multiple mail servers and it has nice filtering capabilities so work email goes in one directory , personal goes into another, and so on.

Your outgoing email requires an SMTP server. YOu only need one. Your incoming mail can come from many POP3 servers.

You need to find out from your e-mail provider what the name of their smtp and pop3 servers are. For example:

Let's say that my incoming mail is served via pop3.mail.foo.com and foo.com sends all it's mail out via smtp.mail.foo.com

In KMail I go to the Settings/Configuration menu and click it. The setting dialog comes up. I go to "Network" and select "SMTP". FOr my server name I put in smtp.mail.foo.com and I use port 25 (which is the standard smtp port)

Then I click "add" under the "incoming mail" label and a new dialog box comes up. I would enter pop3.mail.foo.com as the server name and use port 110. Fill in the rest of the information as required. Note that for "user name" some email clients require just the account name. So if my email is dog@foo.com then my user name is "dog", but other email clients require the full email address as the user name. Try both to see which one your's needs.

That's pretty much it. This will pretty much work for Netscape communicator, KMail, even Outlook in Windoze.

Good luck.

[Joshie the CK]

Thanks for the info, but I guess I should've made my situation clearer... :)

I'm talking about a mail *server* on my box.
So that, in linux, any of my users (all three of us. :D) could open pine, (or whatever) and send a message to the outside world, and the recipient would get it from "user@foo.org", and then be able to reply to it, and the message would be sent back to my linux box...

I'm not even sure how complicated it is, which is what I'm trying to find out. :)

[Ig0r]

I use Exim as an SMTP server.
It isn't as robust (or complicated) as sendmail, but for my simple setup it works nicely (and has a nice humanly-parsable configuration file).

[bdg1983]

Lots of good stuff at www.sendmail.org (http://www.sendmail.org)

[girl]

Hi
Another option to get around configuring sendmail is to use Webmin. All I had to edit was the local domains, and the spam control options. Much easier that way!
girl
:)