Home/Small Office Email server

[Grimshaw Stuart <stuart.grimshaw@xxxxxxx>]

Here it is. My first draft of the Home/Small Office Email Server Howto.
It's taken a lot longer to write than I thought, and it's by no means
complete. In particular then section on setting up qmail is a bit weak,
but the docs are very good, and qmail is simple to get working. In fact
the reason it's weak is because it was so easy, but I'd appreciate
comments from people on that section in particular.

Please regard this document as an Alpha version, and while I'm pretty
sure t wont bugger anything up, don't try it on a production server that
carries mail for your multi-national mail server :)

Speaking of Multinational mail servers, when you do decide to upgrade
from this solution to a proper mail server, qmail will still satisfy
your needs, qmail is what Hotmail is run on!!

Simply put, this howto will turn your freeserve/freenetname account into
a proper email server for your small office/home.

Feel free to mail me direct (stubbynet is best, that's my address at
home and any mail's that need to look at configs will be best answred
there) with any questions, comments, praise, abuse and any other insane
ramblings...



Stuart Grimshaw,
System Administrator,
Community, Leisure & Cultural Services Dept.
Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council.
t:01254 587235	 stuart.grimshaw@xxxxxxx
f:01254 660236	 stuart@xxxxxxx




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Home/Small Business Email Server.
Stuart Grimshaw <stuart@xxxxxxx>

v0.01, 23rd February 2000

List the tools, software and describe the procedure for setting up a
small office/home email server.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 History.
1.2 New Versions.
1.3 Comments.
1.3.1 Version History.
1.4 Copyright & Trademarks.
1.5 Acknowledgements.

2. SOFTWARE & ISP's

2.1 Choosing an ISP.
2.2 Server Software.

3. OUT OF CHAOS COMES ORDER

3.1 Installing & configuring the software.
3.1.1 pppd
3.1.2 fetchmail
3.1.3 qmail & serialmail

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 History

At the beginning of January 2000, I set up a Linux server at work, for
evaluation purposes. After a little playing around, with the Apache web
server, the Samba module and various bits of network monitoring software I
was
hooked. I immediatly saw how this could be used to create my own email
server
at home.

One of the things that my monitoring software could do was send email
alerts
on encountering a problem. To get this working I had to set up sendmail.
This
gave me the idea of using Linux and one of the various free ISP's at home
as a
small email server.

I quickly became apparent that I could set up a complete mail system using
tools like fetchmail and qmail.

This document is intended to be a guide on how to set one up yourself for
your
home or small business. If you already have an old PC (my setup runs on a
P75
with 24mb of RAM) and a modem, the only cost to you will the call charges!!



1.2 New Versions

New versions of this document can be found at
http://www.stubbynet.org.uk/home-mail-server-HOWTO



1.3 Comments

Comments on this HOWTO can be directed to <stuart@xxxxxxx>

1.3.1 Version History

0.01 - First version.



1.4 Copyright & Trademarks.

(c) 2000 Stuart M. Grimshaw <stuart@xxxxxxx>

This manual may be reproduced in whole or in part, without fee,
subject to the following restrictions:

·  The copyright notice above and this permission notice must be
preserved complete on all complete or partial copies

·  Any translation or derived work must be approved by the author in
writing before distribution.

·  If you distribute this work in part, instructions for obtaining the
complete version of this manual must be included, and a means for
obtaining a complete version provided.

·  Small portions may be reproduced as illustrations for reviews or
quotes in other works without this permission notice if proper
citation is given.

Exceptions to these rules may be granted for academic purposes: Write
to the author and ask. These restrictions are here to protect us as
authors, not to restrict you as learners and educators.



1.5 Acknowledgements.

Most of this project was completed using the docs provided with the
software,
however I must thank Charles Blackburn <charlesb@xxxxxxx>
for his help with pppd and other dial up problems I was having with my ISP
and Linux. Also the guys and gals at www.linuxnewbie.com


2 Software & ISP's

2.1 Choosing an ISP.

For a home email server to be usefull you really need to be able to have as
many email addresses as you want. Many of the free ISP's in the UK offer
this,
in fact most of them don't give you much choice, anything sent to anything
at
your account gets filtered through to your email address. For example,
anything sent to @smgsys.freenetname.co.uk would get through to my mailbox
under Windows 95.

Another thing to look for in a free ISP is call charges, not just your
on-line
charges, but the cost of calling their technical support helpline. Most
companies charge up to a pound a minute for tech support.

I have used several free internet providers in the UK, including Freeserve
(www.freeserve.co.uk), Dabsol (www.dabsol.net) and my current provider,
Freenetname (www.freenetname.co.uk)

Freenetname offers the mail funneling I mentioned in the first paragraph,
as
well as free tech support (via an 0800 number), and also an interesting
service whereby you get your own domain name, for free! There is a little
catch in that you don't actually own the domain name, they do, but they
will
"sell it" to you if you require. Setting up your ISP account is
beyond this
HOWTO, but is covered in the ISP-hookup-HOWTO.

2.2 Server Software.

There are 3 things you need to be able to do to operate an email server on
your LAN (assuming it isn't connected to the internet via ISDN leased
lines,
or some other permanent way):

o  Dial your ISP.
o  Fetch the mail from your ISP.
o  Deliver mail from your local LAN.

I have broken the process into these 3 main sections because each one
requires
a seperate bit of software.

o  pppd - a standard util with most Linux distro's
o  fetchmail - again a standard Linux bit of kit.
o  qmail - used instead of sendmail.

You may have noticed I've gone for a mail transport agent (MTA) other than
sendmail. I won't go into detail as to why, save to say it's a security and
setup thing.

pppd & fetchmail came with my distro of Redhat 6.0, but it wouldn't do
any
harm to download the latest versions. Also grab the latest version of qmail
while you're at it.

o ***** NEED URL'S FOR SOFTWARE



3 Out of chaos comes order...

3.1 Installing & Configuring the software.

3.1.1 pppd

The setup of pppd is straight forward. I installed mine straight from the
rpm's with no messing.

Configuring is equally straightforward, and involves editing 2 or 3 files.
First off you need to create a script that pppd will use to negotiate its
connection with your ISP. Here is mine, you should only really need to edit
the username, password and ISP phone number bits.

ABORT "NO CARRIER"
ABORT "NO DIAL TONE"
ABORT "ERROR"
ABORT "NO ANSWER"
ABORT "BUSY"
ABORT "failed"

"" "AT"
"OK" "AT&F&D0&C1"
"OK" "ATDT012341234567"
"CONNECT" ""
"ogin:" "<username>@freenetname.co.uk"
"word:" "<password>"

I call this file freenetname.chat and I put it in a folder called
"peers".
There's no real reason I dont think, it just keeps them tidy.

Next you need to tell pppd to use this file, to do this edit your
/etc/ppp/options file to look something like :

ttyS1
115200
modem
crtscts
defaultroute
mtu 576
noipdefault
connect '/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/ppp/peers/freenetname.chat'
noauth
user "<username>@freenetname.co.uk"

ipcp-accept-local
ipcp-accept-remote
lock
asyncmap 0
mru 542
lcp-echo-interval 30
lcp-echo-failure 4

idle 600

noipx

usepeerdns

I'm not going to go into detail about what these two files do, for that
check
out the seperate PPP-HOWTO.

Okay, so that's the dial up out of the way. Now would be a good time to
test
it. Just type "pppd" and away it should go. To stop it, just type
"killall
-INT pppd". There may be a better way, but that's the way I do it.

3.1.2 fetchmail

Fetchmail was the only part of this project that I used a GUI for, simply
because some advice on Linuxnewbie told me so. It worked a treat and came
up
with this .fetchmailrc :

set postmaster "postmaster"
set nobouncemail
set properties ""
poll mail.freenetname.co.uk with proto POP3 envelope X-Envelope-To aka \
stubbynet.org.uk
user "<username>@freenetname.co.uk" there with password
"<password>" is * \
here options fetchall warnings 3600 forcecr

In the above example the "\" signifies no new line, in the usual
linux way.
Don't actually include them in the file.

Obviously you need to replace "aka stubbynet.org.uk" with your
domain name.
While your setting up fetchmail, you might want to add "keep" to
your options,
this will prevent fetchmail from deleting your mail once it's been
downloaded.
This will prove invaluable as you set up qmail.

Note the option "forcecr". This option is essential. Without
going geek on you
all, Qmail needs it.

3.1.3 qmail & serialmail

qmail & serial are surprisingly easy to set up, just follow the
instructions.


4 Setting up users.

There are 2 ways you can set up users with qmail. The first is to set up an
actual Unix user, and the other is to set up a QMail alias.

You need at least 1 real user (not root) so you can attach from a client
and
download your email.

As part of the QMail setup, you should have created a user called alias,
with a
home directory of /var/qmail/alias or similar. To create a QMail alias,
create a
file in that directory called .qmail-"alias", where alias is the
name of the
email address you want to create. The format is explained in the
"dot-qmail"
manpage, but for now the command you'll want is "&". To
create an alias "cinema"
that goes to local user "stuart" create a file called :

.qmail-cinema

that contains 1 line :

&stuart@xxxxxxx


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