My setup is not exactly what you're looking for as to which OS to use to run the server but it is similar. To achieve your goal you would need the same kind of components and configuration.
I run a local Courier IMAP server on a Linux box that I access from my Mac or my Wintel computers on the LAN, so I have a centralized mail repository that's easier to backup and avoids duplication of mail and folder structure on each client computer. I also use fetchmail to collect email from multiple remote accounts, as described further below. An IMAP server alone is not sufficient. It serves email that's stored in your mailbox on the local server, but the mail has to get onto the local server first. So you also need an SMTP mail server like sendmail that will receive incoming email and deliver it to your mailbox on the local server. In my case I use qmail instead of sendmail on my Linux server for a variety of reasons (One of them is that qmail stores individual messages as separate files on the filesystem in a special Maildir directory, instead of accumulating them in a single mbox file. In my opinion this is a better way of storing email). If you have a permanent broadband Internet connection and your own domain name (e.g. example.com), you can configure your domain so that mail sent to example.com will be delivered to the SMTP server running on your own local server. Alternatively, you can continue having your mail delivered to your mailbox(es) at your service providers (e.g. your ISP, dotMac, Yahoo, or a specialized mail hosting provider) and use a tool to pull mail from your remote mailboxes and re-deliver it to the mailbox on your local server via its SMTP server. One such tool is the popular fetchmail which was designed just for that purpose. fetchmail pulls mail from any number of remote IMAP or POP mail accounts at regular intervals in the background. This is the method that I use since I have DSL with dynamic IP and I don't want to keep my Linux server on 24 hours a day 365 days a year, so while my local mail server is not running, mail continues to be safely delivered and stored at my service providers. Does this all seem confusing? Here is a summary of the workflow: Mail is first delivered to remote mail account @yourisp.com, @mac.com, ... -> local fetchmail pulls mail from remote account via POP or IMAP -> local fetchmail re-sends mail to local SMTP server to be delivered to local mail account -> local SMTP server drops mail received from fetchmail into your local mailbox -> local IMAP server serves your local mailbox to your local email clients As you can see this is pretty complicated. It's even more complicated if you're not familiar with the Unix way of doing things. You have to compile the software, deal with command-line interfaces and arcane configuration files. I'm a professional software engineer relatively comfortable with Unix/Linux and it took me a while to figure this all out after reading many HOWTOs and mailing list archives. The nice thing though is that once your setup is complete and working, you can basically forget about it. I would expect that it becomes even more difficult if you want to run your setup on OS X because of porting issues. For me it was definitely worth the trouble. There are many benefits in using this setup. Regarding the Entourage database bloating, I think that using the IMAP server definitely and significantly reduces it, though I'm not sure it completely eliminates it over time, as I believe Entourage still stores some data in its database for caching. The choice of which components to use (e.g. sendmail vs. qmail vs. postfix, or Courier IMAP vs. WU-IMAP vs. Cyrus) is a matter of taste and degree of support for the server platform you intend to use (OS X in your case). I can't provide you with specific help for running this setup on OS X since I use Linux for my server, but I found some hints for installing some of those components on OS X which you may find useful. Here: <http://www.osxfaq.com/FAQ/Porting_Apps_FAQ/index.ws>, and here: <http://www.matthewbutch.com/pages/macintosh/sysreports.html>. I don't know how accurate or up-to-date they are. You should probably be able to find more information on the net via a Google search. Lastly, though I haven't looked at it closely myself, Mac OS X Server might be a solution to your need. Doesn't it come with an IMAP server? It would be a more expensive solution but it would probably save you a lot of time and pain. You would still need to add yourself a tool like fetchmail, though. Sorry for the long message. Hope this helps, X. On 12/20/02 2:54 PM, "Kirk McElhearn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The posts on getting an IMAP server to work with Entourage lead me to raise > that question - can this be done easily? I have an Airport network in my > home-office, and it would make sense for me to use my iMac (running as a > file server) to run an IMAP server, so I can have all my mail either on the > iMac or my iBook. Is this doable easily? What does one need to run as the > server? > > Also, is it worth the trouble? I'm thinking that it will avoid having my > Entourage database bloating - I get lots of big attachments by e-mail, as > well as making backups more centralized. > > Thanks, > > > Kirk -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.letterrip.com/> old-archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
