I am very confused. I have a home network. It consists of a linux server, an ISDN router (black box, not adaptable) and 4 workstations that are dual-bootable to run Windows 98 and linux. I want to setup an email system that allows me and my partner to each access our email folders at any computer under either OS. The first plan was to find Windows clients that could access Linux email files. It seems that Netscape Messenger and Eudora both use standard mbox format, so it looked like a fairly simple solution. Get the MTA to stick the mail in the user's home directory (as qmail would prefer to do anyway), then export the home directory with NFS on Linux and Samba on Windows, and point the mail clients at the appropriate exported directory. Except it would seem that that's a bad idea because of locking issues and the potential for corrupting the mailbox and losing mail. Is that right? http://home.netscape.com/eng/mozilla/2.0/relnotes/demo/movemail.html explains how to get round this with Netscape under Unix, but is there a generic solution for a mixed Windows and linux environment? I thought I would see if I could use movemail as a stand-alone program rather than invoking it from Netscape, so that I could run movemail immediately after picking up mail with fetchmail, to move the mail from the spool file to Netscape's Inbox. But there are two problems with this: 1. I can't get movemail to work on its own. I'm cheating and trying to use the version that comes with emacs, because I couldn't find a pointer on the Web to a standalone movemail package. I can't get any information on how to use this, other than movemail's error response when I use it wrong. But this message makes it look pretty simple. I don't know what the -p option does, but it's fairly obvious what "inbox" and "destfile" are. But whether or not I use the -p option, movemail won't let me move messages to the destfile (Netscape's Inbox file), because it already exists. I thought the _point_ of movemail was to move mail to an already existing file. Am I doing something wrong? Can I not use emacs' movemail for these purposes? Can I use movemail in this way at all? 2. Even if I could get movemail to work, would this get round the locking problem? It gets round the problem of corrupting the spool file, because I can put a lock on that, but doesn't it just move the corruption risk to Netscape's Inbox? What happens if I am accessing, moving and deleting files in my Netscape Inbox while movemail is trying to move files there? If I'm using a Windows client, I can't see how I can lock the Inbox or prevent this risk of a clash in any other way. Assuming this is out of the window, what are my other options? It looks to me that IMAP may be the best bet. Would I be working along the right lines if I try the following: 1. Pick up mail with fetchmail 2. Pass to Port 25 for qmail to stick the messages in the right mail spool. 3. Use an IMAP server to serve these messages to clients on the various machines. The principle seems straightforward enough, but I am confused by the practice. (a) I want to sort the messages for the mailing lists I belong to into separate folders. Should I use procmail, or should I use Netscape's filters? (b) Can I just create folders for these mailing lists under Netscape? How does that work with the IMAP server? Isn't the IMAP server simply serving the messages out of the spool file (or directory)? If so, how can Netscape create server-based folders? (c) What should I do about sending mail? I could just let Netscape connect to my ISP's SMTP server direct (i.e. through my router). Are there disadvantages to this? I'm not even sure if I can do this, but should I be setting up qmail on my server as the smart-host for the other machines, and getting it to queue the outgoing mail for my scheduled connections to the ISP mail servers. How would I force a connect for an urgent message outside the scheduled connection times, in this case? And how would I get the server to recognize unscheduled connections, so that it can download messages without waiting for the scheduled connection times? (The ip-up script is useless for this, right, if I am connecting from each machine directly through a router?) (d) How important is it that I use maildir rather than mbox format? All the info on the qmail sites seems to imply that it's very important, but is maildir really necessary for my meager needs? And would it be more complicated to use than mbox files? (e) How easy is it to set this up? I found a link to the RPM of IMAP that has been patched to work with qmail on the web-site. I downloaded it, but it wants various packages before I can install - principally various kerberos packages, I think. Do I really need to get into Kerberos? All I want is a simple mail setup. Kerberos seems to be overkill, or am I really at a severe security risk without it? Why does IMAP need to be patched at all to work with qmail, if qmail is configured to use mbox format? Why can't I just have qmail stick mail in mbox format spool files in each user's home directory, and then have IMAP serve the messages from those files (symlinked to appropriate files in /var/spool/mail) to the appropriate user's client? (f) Is there any way to avoid double configuration? The nice thing about the original plan, was that there was no need to give user passwords to the email client. With the IMAP plan, won't I have to configure each email client with the appropriate user name and password - the same user name and password that I had just logged in with? I could probably think of loads more questions, if I let myself go on. As I say, I am very confused, and the more I read up about this on the Web, the more confused I get. Can anyone suggest a good, straightforward guide (Internet or paper) to this sort of problem? I can't see why mail should be such a problem, when it's really such a simple principle underneath. But it would seem that those that best understand mail are those that are least equipped to communicate their understanding in comprehensible language. Sorry if this seems somewhat tangential to qmail issues. Any help would be appeciated, because I have prevaricated over this for over a year, and I would really like to get this sorted. Cheers, Bruno Prior [EMAIL PROTECTED]
