Need Email Server Solution for MyCompany.com using a Dynamic IP Address

[newtonviet]

Company Profile:

MyCompany.com is small 5-person company experiencing a moderate growth rate. We expect to add 5 more employees in the coming months. The requirements are:
• The ability for each employee to access their own email from their desktops.
• The ability to add new users quickly and inexpensively.
• Virus protection for all users.
• Reduce Spam to employees.
• Access company email via a Web browser from anywhere on the Internet.

Context:
At the time of initial installation, Mycompany.com has 5 employees:

1. Chris: Admin
2. Jennifer, Jakub, Christina and Philip.

Each employee has a computer that is connected to a small local network (LAN). Only a single computer in the office has access to the Internet via a single ADSL connection to the local Internet Service Provider. In addition, all email accounts, as well as the web site for “mycompany.com“ are being hosted by our local Internet Service Provider.
In the near future, mycompany.com is planning to add 5 new employees with plans to add several more users in the future. It has become apparent to everyone that each user needs immediate access to his/her email account, as well as browsing access to the World Wide Web.

Mycompany.com currently has 8 virtual email addresses and 7 POP accounts as follows:
• chris@mycompany.com
• jennifer@mycompany.com
• jakub@mycompany.com
• sales@mycompany.com (forwards to chris@mycompany.com)
• info@mycompany.com
• support@mycompany.com
• christina@mycompany.com, and;
• philip@mycompany.com

The schematic diagram of our system is in the picture attached.

Requirement:
We need a Linux Mail Server solution for mycompany.com that run on Fedora 6 or any other distro like OpenSuse, Ubuntu, etc.

We need “Remote Account” feature for mycompany.com that allow our email server to remotely connect to our only one POP account located in the ISP server and pull all incoming emails into the appropriate user's local mailbox. The employees at mycompany.com can also send email directly through our Mail Server or using our ISP by SMTP relay.
Reason to have only one POP Mail Account:
Currently, our ISP charges them $30 USD per POP account per year, thus their 7 POP boxes currently cost mycompany.com $210 dollars annually.
Instead of setting up our Mail Server to pull emails from the 7 separate POP accounts costing mycompany.com $210 per year, we set up a single POP account for mycompany.com at our ISP seerver, create a “wildcard” alias for it that will result in anything@mycompany.com being forwarded to the single POP account, and close all of the other POP accounts. Now that “everything@mycompany.com” is being sent to a single POP account, Chris can now use our mail server to connect to the ISP POP account, download all of the messages, and forward them to the appropriate users.
Several weeks later, Chris determines that the email address “accounting@mycompany.com” needs to be added for accounting purposes. Chris adds the account to our mail server, and “accounting@mycompany.com” is live and working immediately without the need to contact our ISP or pay an additional $30 per year.

Please give us advice and detailed instructions with Linux Code or better the configuration files to do this job. Thank you.

[nbourre]

Why you don't check for a provider there are many cheap one out there. By example 1and1.com.

They offer for 3$/month you have a 600 emails! Accessible by web.

This is what my company use.

Nick

[newtonviet]

Thanks for your suggestion.

Now, we are able to set-up our system.

The details of the systems are as followings:
1. Install SCALIX (get from www.scalix.com) and this acts as the email server.
2. Install fetchmail to get the emails from IPS's POP to deliver to SMTP port 25 of Scalix and Scalix will sort out the emails to respective users.

We have also made a VMWare appliance of the Scalix Mail server based on Centos 4.4.

The torrent file is attached and also the .fetchmailrc configuration file.

The appliance is pre-configured with the Scalix server version 11.0.2 with a fictional mail domain scalixmail.mycompany.com

Detail of applications

Linux Centos 4.4 OS http://www.centos.org
Apache 2 Web Server http://www.apache.org
Scalix 10.0.2 Email Server http://www.scalix.com

logins are set to either root or admin
All passwords are set to haison

Detailed configuration
Centos 4.4:
512Mb Ram
4Gb Disk
512MB Swap partition
Login: root
Password: haison

Scalix
Scalix has been pre-installed with the mail domain that would need to be reconfigured if you want to change to your actual domain. To do this, following the steps below.

1. Ensure correct IP settings. verify /etc/hosts file and DNS.
Example /etc/hosts..
# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1 localhost
192.168.1.2 scalixmail.xxx.com scalixmail

Depending on your LAN IP, you should change the server IP, e.g. mycompany has IP range 192.168.1.xx so I setup the server IP as above. If you make any modifications to IP settings restart the OS as a precaution before starting Scalix installation.

After installation connect to sac and/or webmail via http://(hostname)/sac or http://(hostname)/webmail. If you have problems sending mail check your DNS settings, /etc/hosts, /var/opt/scalix/sys/smtpd.cfg and Scalix online forum at http://www.scalix.com/forums/

Last updated: March 24, 2007

Admin account of Scalix Mail Server (When login to http://(hostname)/sac)
Username: sxadmin
Password: haison