From: Niall O Broin (nobroin at domain sced.esoc.esa.de)
Date: Thu 22 Apr 1999 - 17:52:03 IST
Hi all,
I'm looking for suggestions for a mail setup. I have a client in
Dublin who currently use provider A for mail - their domain is hosted there
with 10 mail accounts which they pop from and they are happy with the
service. They're about to have a server co-located with provider B, because
the response from provider A about providing this service just didn't give
us a warm and fuzzy feeling, although they were only 2/3 of the price. So,
they need to relocate their mail to the new provider as well. (I'm sure its
technically possible to have the MX for their domain pointing to provider A
and the A record pointing to provider B but I don't feel it's a good idea.)
Provider B doesn't want to provide any more than 5 POP accounts. Beyond
that, they want you to have your own mail server and just periodically poll
them for mail. Local users can then use whatever mail clients and whatever
protocols they want against the local server. This is A Good Thing - the
local mail server can fetch the mail several times a day, thus avoiding
having users bringing the ISDN line up whenever they need to send an
email.
But (you were waiting for that, weren't you ?) this brings up a problem
with travelling users. With the current scenario, they just connect to
provider A's pop server from wherever they happen to be. In the new
scenario, they won't be able to do that if the mail server runs on a box in
the client's office as it doesn't have a permanent connection. The obvious
solution that springs to mind is to have the co-located server run the mail
server as well, but then what do the people who are not travelling do - pop
or imap to the server, as they currently do, losing one of the advantages
of running a server. It occurs to me that perhaps the thing to do is to run
the server on the co-located box, and to use fetchmail from there to the
office for the non-travelling users.
Anyway, I think you get the picture. Suggestions welcomed - pints for the
winner when I come to Dublin in a couple of weeks to put this all together.
P.S. Somebody mentioned a while ago on this list a nice set of instructions
for setting up sendmail under RedHat which involved getting the 8.9.1
RPMs. I'm sure I saved the information, but I don't know where :-( Who was
that and where are the instructions ?
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