[ILUG] setting up an IMAP server.

[Martin Feeney]

Darragh Ó Héiligh wrote:

> I am trying to set up a machine to basically take mail from a few mail
> boxes so I can use something like squirrelmail to read them while away
> or Imap while I'm at home.

Sounds perfectly sensible.  I have a very similar setup.

> The way I think it should work is the following:
> Fetchmail should check these three or four accounts for mail, spam
> assasson should get rid of any spam, Clamav should check for viruses
> and I should then be able to set up something like (currior)? to
> handle the IMAP side of things.  While away from home, I should be
> able to set up squirrelmail so I can access it via webmail.
> 
> I'm hoping sendmail can be configured to send from a number of
> different accounts.  Can any one verify if this is possible?

As mentioned in another reply - that's a MUA issue.  I'd also recommend 
postfix over sendmail if you don't already have a lot of time invested in 
learning sendmail's config files.

> If manually, where do I start?

If you're using courier for imap, then you'll need to know that it expects 
user mail to be in Maildir format.  You'll need to configure procmail or 
your MTA to deliver to Maildirs.

Once you have mail in Maildir format and courier set up to look at it 
(which it should do pretty much out of the box), you'll need to configure 
squirrelmail for courier's quirks.  Luckily the conf.pl in 
/etc/squirrelmail has defaults for most imap packages.  As root, run 
./conf.pl in /etc/squirrelmail.  Under Server settings (2) Select Imap 
Settings (A) and tell it the server software (8) is courier.  That should 
set all the difficult settings to sensible ones.

Note the menu numbers are for my version of squirrelmail and may be 
different in yours.

When configuring apache for squirrelmail, consider using a self-signed ssl 
cert and using https.

See:
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Apache-WebDAV-LDAP-HOWTO/ssl.html
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/SSL-RedHat-HOWTO.html


> I just need a few pointers in the right direction.  I've tried messing
> around with fetchmail before but I got slightly stuck but I'm hoping
> this time I'll know a bit more about it.

You could try installing fetchmailconf.  But /etc/fetchmailrc is pretty 
easy to understand

For example say your mail lives on mail.mymailisp.net and you normally 
collect from this via POP.  Unfortunately the isp didn't let you have your 
first choice of email address, so you have dar001 at mymailisp.net, 
foo002 at mymailisp.net and bar003 at mymailisp.net, the appropriate fetchmailrc 
lines would be:

poll mail.mymailisp.net with proto POP3
     user 'dar001' there with password 'secret' is darragh here fetchall
     user 'foo001' there with password 'secret' is userfoo here fetchall
     user 'bar001' there with password 'secret' is userbar here fetchall

If the ISP supports POP3 over SSL, just add the keyword ssl to each line 
before fetchall.

For spamassassin and clamav, you had best look at some howtos.  There are 
many ways to implement them.  The one piece of advice I have for you here 
is to use spamc/spamd - otherwise you'll be forking a possibly very large 
and cpu intensive process for every email delivered and you may bring your 
machine to its knees if you don't rate-limit what gets sent to 
spamassassin/clamav.

For a postfix/amavis/clamav/spamassassin quick howto, see:
http://www.khoosys.net/single.htm?ipg=1565

The howto is for mandrake, but I assume you can figure out how to install 
the packages - the configuration in the howto should still be relevant.  I 
haven't used this howto myself, so I give no guarantees as to whether it 
works or not.

Regards,

Martin.