[sciman]

I am beginning to believe that it is not possible to set up pop email on an Xserver for multiple users.

I have posted threads in several forums, but had very little response in how to retrieve my email from my domain provider?

At a complete loose end, beginning to think that i should of used an IBM compatible machine.

What a nightmare!

[Mr Scruff]

Your post isn't very clear about what exactly you're trying to do. Could you elaborate?

[sciman]

Sorry!

Can anyone tell me how to set up email on the apple xserve so that I can get in coming pop mail to the server and the distribute it to clients on the network. The mail needs to stay on the server and just be accessed by the clients, this is so we can back up the mail. A detailed explanation on how to do this would really help me out as this is the first time I have had to set up mail on an apple Mac server.

Also anything else that i need to do to get it running smoothly?

[Judge_Fire]

Which version of Mac OS X Server are you running?

From Apple's site :"Mac OS X Server usesPostfix as its SMTP mail transfer agent and Cyrus for IMAP and POP support. The high-performance Postfix mail server is easy to configure and highly secure. Developed by Carnegie Mellon, the open source Cyrus scales well to large enterprise systems. "

There seems to be decent material at the Cyrus and PostFix sites, have you gone through that?

J

[sciman]

We are using Xserver 10.2.3

I believe that the Xserver has all the appropriate software pre-installed to allow email configuration and set up?

do i need to buy anything extra?

[Gee4orce]

Have you read through the extensive and detailed manuals (in pdf format) that are included with the OS X Server installation disk ? You can download the latest ones from Apple - I think the Panther ones are even more detailed, although I think the move to Postfix was recent and therefore the Panther information might not be relevent for you.

There's tons and tons of info available on the web about this kind of thing.

[sciman]

Cheers guys,

I have read through a lot of the information that was delivered with the Xserver. However it spends more time describing what POP, SMTP, IMAP actually means rather than where you need to enter the information on the system.

Having spent some time setting up other systems <Microsoft Exchange> I have some understanding of Post Office Protocol, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, Internet Message Access Protocols but don’t know where to enter the appropriate information in the server admin application?

All I want to do is get my mail from my domain provider, but where do I enter my user name and password to allow me to login and pull the emails using POP.

Once I have the emails locally I can distribute it to the appropriate users using IMAP which is working fine internally as each user can send emails to each other using their short names. This bit seems to be missed from the manual, or I have become text blind from reading it for too long?

[Scifience]

I'm not sure this is possible using OS X Server's built-in tools.

It sounds like what you want to do is (correct me if I am mistaken):

(1) Download e-mail from an external POP account
(2) Store it on a local IMAP account and allow local users access to said IMAP account

Personally, I would write a shell script for this and set it as a cron job to run every hour or so.
What you basically want the shell script to do is:

(1) Download the e-mail from the external POP account and store it locally
(2) Forward/copy the contents of that mailbox to an IMAP mailbox
(3) Delete the contents from the original POP mailbox

Hope this helps you somewhat!

[larkost]

If what you want to do is move the mail from a pop3 server to your server (and then from there with IMAP). Then all you need to do is to setup fetchmail to move the mail over. 'man fetchmail' for more information.

I have a similar setup running on a FreeBSD server, and from that I would advise:

use a fetchmailrc file
running in daemon mode
setting a cron job to re-call the daemon once (or more) a day... sometimes they get stuck

This works very well.