Hello,
I have been helping out in setting up and running a small Edubuntu powered
office environment for Birmingham Friends of the Earth in the UK.
Our email has been happily residing on the Edubuntu server for a couple of
months now. My existing problem is in trying to refine it a bit more.
Specifically the automatic removal of spam.
Okay here's an outline of how the email in general is setup.
P.s The IMAP setup was inherited from the old server which we pensioned off to
make way for the Edubuntu system.
Mail Accounts
POP3
Our organisation has a single email address which is advertised on our website
'info@'.
This account also is a catch all account and receives anything else outside
our specified mailboxes.
We also have some emails which we don't advertise 'it@' 'manager@' etc
Server setup
This runs an IMAP (in maildir format I think) courtesy of Courier
Fetchmail collects mail from all of the accounts and dumps them all into the
same directory
Clients
We don't have any private emails as such and all of our workstations are
configured so that everyone can see all of the emails.
Thunderbird is the mail client
There are mailfilters setup for all of the clients thunderbirds which filter
off the different emails into the appropriate subfolders
The above client setup was done as follows.
1-The basic 'info@' account was created on each of the machines
2-On the 'server' machine tbird mail subfolders were created and then also
3- Multiple identities were created in tbird through the menu for each email
address (so you can reply from 'it@' etc
4- mail filters were setup to take mail from the inbox and place it into the
happy employees respective tbird mail folder
Okay so apart from creating a basic tbird setup on each client (imap
ipaddress/psswrd/account name etc) the multiple identities,mail subfolders,mail
filters were all setup on the server.
THEN a script was written which copied the .msf and prefs.js files from the
server .mozilla-tbird directories out to the clients appropriate home
directories.
This does work successfully and I have managed to add extra email addresses
and corresponding mail folders since by updating the script.
I thought I'd share the above as it took quite a while to come up with a
solution which met our needs. Also email setup in general is a bit of a mystery
to me.
My current efforts are in trying to add some automatic spam filtering.
Tbird does have this facility and I may try and use it. My thoughts on this
are that a single user should log into the 'server' account to read mail first
thing in the morning and then mark the mail as spam or not. With the relevant
option enabled this would train tbirds 'adaptive junkmail detection'.
I am guessing that I could then copy the appropriate .dat file (can't remember
the exact name but I have seen it) where the learning data is stored out to the
other machines.
I have quickly had a go with spamassassin in a simple setup using the 'spam be
gone' python script. (As far as I can gather, the adaptive learning function
using spambegone is not accessible because of spambegone's remote way of
accessing an IMAP server. This maybe makes it less useful than using tbirds
'adaptive detection')
Not sure whether I've got it working properly although it churns through the
emails without errors. Since I dont really know the deep down workings of email
yet I didn't want to try and incorporate spamassassin with Courier in case I
broke our email. This would make me quite unpopular!
My colleagues at work are very happy with the email setup in general, as
since we installed the Edubuntu system we have lots of extra email accounts in
addition to the original 'info@'.
My questions to the forum is -- am I going down the wrong road here? (Although
I think it's too late to change now)
Has anybody tried a similar mail setup ?
Is there a simple or well suited setup for Edubuntu and email?
Am I a bit off topic ? I am lacking general knowledge about email setups.
I guess that Edubuntu is targeted at Educational environments but we are using
it as a business office setup. We are very happy with it as we have been using
very slow and badly configured old linux boxes up until now. We are a cash
strapped organisation.
Ian Moore
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