1 Topic by PaulM47

  • PaulM47
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Topic: New user looking for confidence I'm heading in the right direction ?

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====Is there no search facility in this forum ? I couldn't find one.

I'm a new user looking for a small mail server for SOHO and extended family use, ~10 users and a couple of domains. Mail access is via our ISP (BTconnect), I don't have MX record access. I don't need all the facilities of iRedAdmin Pro and at present can't justify the cost anyway :-(

The base system is TurnKey Linux core (http://www.turnkeylinux.org/) which is Debian based.
I've installed iRedMail 0.8.7, iRedAdmin 0.4 (open source edition) and Webmin 1.71.
iRedMail and MySQL provide the core system, I've not installed the iRedMail iptables.
iRedAdmin (ose) provides me with GUI domain and user management.
Webin provides me with GUI server management, specifically so I can add outgoing mail via a smarthost to Postfix and collect mail from our ISP and several other internet mail providers using Fetchmail.

So far the local mail system appears to work fine, I just need to add Fetchmail and the outgoing smarthost. Am I on the right track here or am I likely to hit problems further down the line ?

Any comments or suggestions would be much appreciated.
PaulM

----

Spider Email Archiver: On-Premises, lightweight email archiving software developed by iRedMail team. Supports Amazon S3 compatible storage and custom branding.

2 Reply by ZhangHuangbin

  • ZhangHuangbin
  • ZhangHuangbin
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Re: New user looking for confidence I'm heading in the right direction ?

PaulM47 wrote:

Is there no search facility in this forum ? I couldn't find one.

Search word "search" in any forum page will show you a link in main navigation bar.

Looks like you don't need your own mail server since your ISP hosts mail accounts for you.

You use ISP mail server as relay, use fetchmail to retrieve email from the mail accounts hosted by ISP, no DNS MX record points to your own mail server, then why not just use a mail client like Outlook/Thunderbird/iPhone/Android/... to access your ISP mail account directly? why bother to setup a mail server?

Correct me if i misunderstood your explanation.

3 Reply by PaulM47

  • PaulM47
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Re: New user looking for confidence I'm heading in the right direction ?

ZhangHuangbin wrote:
PaulM47 wrote:

Is there no search facility in this forum ? I couldn't find one.

Search word "search" in any forum page will show you a link in main navigation bar.

Looks like you don't need your own mail server since your ISP hosts mail accounts for you.

You use ISP mail server as relay, use fetchmail to retrieve email from the mail accounts hosted by ISP, no DNS MX record points to your own mail server, then why not just use a mail client like Outlook/Thunderbird/iPhone/Android/... to access your ISP mail account directly? why bother to setup a mail server?

Correct me if i misunderstood your explanation.

Thanks for your reply.

No, sorry if I wasn't clear, by 'mail access' I meant access to several third party mail suppliers. We don't use our ISP mail server at all, other than to collect account related emails, as I got fed up with re-directing mail if we change our ISP ! BT don't host their own mail anyway, they outsource it to Yahoo ! I use the internal mail server to consolidate mail from the various internet accounts, back it up and provide IMAP access for any user from any network connected device here, including internal mail. We also have a slow, rather unreliable broadband connection so the mail server factors out that problem :-)

Until a while ago I ran a Windoze XP based mail server (VPOP3) but we've completely dropped Windoze in favour of Linux and I've struggled with the complexity of setting up a Linux mail server the hard way. I have one that works, but without SSL etc. and have been looking for something that is a bit simpler to install and maintain. I already use a couple of Turnkey Linux File Servers so Turnkey Linux with iRedMail looked a good combination :-)

Hope that's a bit clearer and thanks for your interest.

4 Reply by ZhangHuangbin

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Re: New user looking for confidence I'm heading in the right direction ?

If you just need a mail server plus fetchmail, i think it's ok.