mail server? (complete new to mail server)

[natefico]

Ok I have no idea what the heck is going on. I want a mail server, but then again I not sure if I do. Mainly because I have no clear picture what a mail server does. I would asume you would be able to use your top lvl domain to send emails to your computer or something like that. If someone could help me out with like a starting point. Basically I want my e-mail to go to me and not to some gmail server. Then be possilbe to get to my e-mail from the net.

[adrenaline]

Ok I have no idea what the heck is going on. I want a mail server, but then again I not sure if I do. Mainly because I have no clear picture what a mail server does. I would asume you would be able to use your top lvl domain to send emails to your computer or something like that. If someone could help me out with like a starting point. Basically I want my e-mail to go to me and not to some gmail server. Then be possilbe to get to my e-mail from the net.

you can do this with sendmail and squirrelmail installed by default in FC3 and most others. simple configuration.

[natefico]

Thanks ill get on the man for sendmail

[aioshin]

opps, FYI, sendmail only function as your outgoing mail server... or MTA ( mail transfer agent), squirrelmail is a webbased client, which means, you also need an IMAP/POP3 server for you to have a fully functional Email Server.
IMAP/POP3 are Cyrus, UW-Imap, Courier, Dovecot
MTA = Qmail, POstfix, Sendmail
where sendmail usually shifts and default MTA of most distro.

[deek]

What distro are you using?

I just configured email last night on my Slackware 10.1 server at home. By default, sendmail is already installed and configured, the only think I had to do was put in the domains to receive mail from in the local hosts file under /etc/mail.

The next thing was to uncomment the lines in my inetd.conf file to allow pop and imap to run.

Finally, I had to set up an MX record on whatever DNS service you are using.

Now all three of those things were just for getting incoming mail. Outgoing mail worked from the get go. I use PINE, so if you did that in Slack, you would just have to go into Pine's config to setup the domain and servers, but that is very self-explanatory.

If you setup pop/imap, then you can basically retrieve your email from any client...it was all fairly easy once you know where to look and with Slackware's default installation, 95% of the work is already done for you...meaning, I didn't have to install a single thing!