Mail server to grab mail from POP SMTP server

[texanmutt]

Hi everyone. I was wanting to know about a possible mail server setup, but was unsure of what I would need to this. In my network, there are 5 people that have over 20 POP3 email accounts from various ISP's. Right now we use winblows Outlook setup with all the different accounts we have. I would like to setup a server that would download (and send) emails from these accounts and hold them on a local server on our network. That way when we check our email on our desktops, it would just download the emails from the local server instead. I'm not looking to setup a primary server that the mail gets delivered to, just a server that gets emails from the primary server. Is there any type of linux program that can do this ?

[puntmuts]

http://www.catb.org/~esr/fetchmail/ can get these mails, a smtp (mail server) can send mails. Examples: postfix, exim, sendmail

[daikatana_]

fetchmail is great for this purpose...

[texanmutt]

Is that the only program that can do that ?

[puntmuts]

http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=fetch...&Go.x=0&Go.y=0

[texanmutt]

Thanks for the link. I'll give some of these things a try. How hard would it be for a linux newb like me to configure fetchmail ?

[daikatana_]

It's really easy to configure fetchmail, just read help and man page

[texanmutt]

I am a bit of a linux newb, so I'm not sure i understand what the docs are saying. Most of the docs seem to be written for people that already understand linux.

fetchmail is a mail-retrieval and forwarding utility; it fetches mail from remote mailservers and forwards it to your local (client) machine’s delivery system. You can then handle the retrieved mail using normal mail user agents such as mutt(1), elm(1) or Mail(1).

Does this mean it fowards it to your email client? What if your client computer is not on ?

What I would like to do is have a local linux machine download from the POP3 server and hold the email until i use a mail client (winblows outlook) to download it from my local linux machine. When I what to sent an email from the email client, I would like it to send the mail to the linux machine and then have the linux machine send it to the SMTP server. I apologize if I'm sounding ignorant, but I don't know much about linux yet. Can anyone describe in a "nutshell" how the fetchmail/sendmail setup works ?

[kkubasik]

your 'client' can be a local delivery program such as procmail (runs on the server) check out this and see if it can give you a good idea of how that might work.