postfix on small network questions.

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1

We are running a small home network and all pc’s have Opensuse 11.2 installed, we have now added a notebook to the mix. The addition of the notebook means we needed to re-jig the mail arrangements.

We want any user to be able to access all their emails either from their workstation, or the notebook

The core network is 3 PC’s We have a dynamic ADSL2 connection to the net, and we collect emails from isp mailboxes, and from websites which we host at various locations.

so we have:
penguin.ourdomain.com 192.168.1.5
loft.ourdomain.com 192.168.1.2
notebook.ourdomain.com 192.168.1.4 (by dhcp)
mythtv.ourdomain.com 192.168.1.15

Presently mail is downloaded from the isp or the remote website mailboxes with Kmail using POP3, to the user’s workstation.

As a start I will need to centralise all mail on one pc, and use NFS to share the files.

The solution which I am looking at using Postfix (installed on penguin to be a combined mailserver/workstation), which would handle all outgoing mail via our isp which is permitted.

Have Fetchmail gather all incoming mails from the various
external mailboxes, and have Dovecot manage user mailboxes and enable imap access from a user from anywhere (especially using the notebook.)
The default install of opensuse seems to have postfix on the computers.

So far I have setup postfix and done some testing (and searched the net for various solutions), so a few questions:

  1. To centralise all user mailboxes on penguin (~/user/maildir/) and copy all existing mail to that location do I just copy all folders from the present ~/user/Mail directory? I believe that the present Kmail is using maildir format, how does the different directory name impact this, or can “maildir” be changed in postfix to “mail”?

  2. Is the proposed solution using Postfix/Dovecot/Fetchmail suitable for this task, or dramatic overkill?

  3. If this solution is OK is postfix needed on each computer?

  4. Mythtv is purely for mythtv, and so I want all system mail to be sent to user “john” on penguin, as well as the results of cron jobs. Presently cron output doesn’t seem to go anywhere from myth, although “MAILTO” is set to an email address, and root mail goes to var/spool/mail on the mythtv computer. What do I need to do here, does this need postfix active on mythtv?

2

  1. Best not to try to copy files manually. When you have dovecot set up, connect Kmail to it and copy the existing IMAP folders into the dovecot folder space (which will be at ~user/Maildir usually but I didn’t tell you that). And you shouldn’t try to access the Maildir directories via NFS, only the dovecot server on penguin should.

  2. It’s fine.

  3. No, only the server. But you will have postfix running on each openSUSE machine anyway if only to deliver local mail.

  4. You need to set the central postfix to listen to the public interface instead of just localhost and it needs to accept mail for ourdomain.com. The setting is SMTPD_LISTEN_REMOTE in /etc/syconfig/mail. On mythtv the destination domain name must have a MX that is penguin, or you should address or forward the mail to john@penguin.ourdomain.com (assuming you have a nameserver setup, or penguin.yourdomain is in /etc/hosts).

3

Thanks, Ken very much appreciated.

Regarding (4.) penguin.mydomain.com is listed in all hosts files, as are the other machines.We have public dns records externally with MX records for mydomain.com pointing to external website. So will use john@penguin.mydomain.com as suggested, and see how we go.

Thanks,
John