[Techtalk] Way to not organise a mail server

[Anne Wainwright]

Hi,

As you will know from other trouble-related posts I have got a ubuntu server up and running.

Now on the email side, the MUA/MTA/MDA terminology was a bit confusing with some of them doing more than one thing, but how I organised it was thus:

postfix to send the mail to my adsl-allowed smtp server
mpop to get the mail from my isp's mail server

then I got sucked in and installed dovecot as a pop3 server so the mail could again be pop'd by my network machines from my ubuntu server.

Not the way it runs on my current office window setup. There I have Mercury Mail Server (sends and collects mail, all in one). But the difference is that it puts the mail in user mailboxes on the server and with the network up then any instance of the MUA (Pegasus) just connects across the network to its mailbox withut the need for a pop.

So I have unnecessarily complicated matters with dovecot, although it works of course.

Question. before I set this to rights, I suppose we have to have a share for each MUA to connect to. It could be a samba share for a windows m/c to connect & an NFS share for the day that I finally ditch windows. But a share is a share, and I need a share to connect, not like connecting to a pop server. 

I seem in my playing about to have created a good selection of mailboxes. Some in /home/anotheranne and then some in /var/mail/  - what goes in there? When I get it all simplified, should the MUAs be collecting from /var/mail/ mailboxes or /home/anotheranne mailboxes?

-- 
so much to do, so little time :(