On Mon, 2003-11-10 at 17:07, Eric Walstad wrote: > Greetings kind debianites, > > I'm in the process of learning MTA admin. My head is about to explode. > > I'm wanting to setup a Debian box that'll suck down pop email from an > ISP for a few local users and then serve those email up via pop3 or > imap on the LAN. Following some advice I received on this list, I > installed fetchmail, courier-imap, courier-pop and exim4. I then found > that exim4 and courier like different mailbox formats. I couldn't find > a way to make exim4 work with courier's maildir format, so I figured > I'd replace exim4 with courier-mta. Now fetchmail and courier-mta are > fighting (courieresmtp throws an ERROR 513, syntax error, when > fetchmail tries to forward an email) over addresses like > "[EMAIL PROTECTED]". > > So, I'm stuck. I haven't had any luck in figuring out how to fix > courier and I don't know how to fix exim4. > > Any sage bits of advice are appreciated.
fetchmail shouldn't be forwarding email; it should pass it it through port 25 to your MTA. How does fetchmail get email from weird addresses like [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sounds like that should be passed to port 25 directly by an MUA running on, well, localhost. I've got this setup for my LAN: - fetchmail 6.2.4-1 grabs email from my & my wife's pop mailboxes, and passes it to postfix 2.0.16-2. - postfix filters it through SpamAssassin 2.60-2, and then uses maildrop 1.5.3-1 to place each email in Maildir sub-directories under /home on my machine. - courier-imap 1.7.3-10 then feeds the mail to any client anywhere on the LAN that has the right password for each individual user. 1st thing is to remove fetchmail, and get your MTA installed and working, so that you can do something like: $ echo 'testing 123' | mail -s 'a test' foo and have it show up in /var/mail/foo. Next is to set up fetchmail to get it to pass email from the ISP to your MTA and drop it in /var/mail/$USER. Next is to install courier-imap and use maildirmake to create mail- dirs on the *mail server* under the $HOME of each user. Thus, an account will have to be created on the mail server for each user. (Virtual IMAP servers are possible, but overkill in your situation.) Then, with a slight change to your MTA's config file(s), you tell it to drop the email in Maildir/ instead of /var/mail/$USER. After you restart your MTA, another quick test should verify if you see new files in the /home/$USER/Maildir/new of the user that you sent a test email to. (If you use a GUI email client, each $USER easily be able to drag- and-drop the emails in his /var/mail/$USER file to his /home/$USER/ Maildir/cur file. The internals will be hidden, though.) Then, you can get SpamAssassin installed and integrated into your MTA. Lastly, you can install a server-side filter like maildrop or the more popular procmail, which can drop the emails in Maildir/ sub- directories that you create with 'maildirmake -f'. NOTE: to make a Maildir/ for joe, you'll have to 'su joe' and go to joe's $HOME. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Ron Johnson, Jr. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jefferson, LA USA 296,443 sq mi (767,787 sq km) are needed for 6 billion people to live at the same population density as Manhattan, New York. That is ~ Arizona or Nevada. Alternatively, that ~ double the size of Japan or Zimbabwe -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]