There are too many variables in your situation to give you a definitive
answer. ONE way to do what you want is:
a. leave the individual e-mail accounts on the ISP's server.
b. set up the Linux host to connect to the ISP's server periodically
(perhaps the 4 times a day you mentioned) and download the mail.
c. have all outgoing e-mail queue on the Linux host and get sent out when
the server connects to the ISP.
If your LAN really needs to support only e-mail connectivity, you might not
even need ISDN for this ... depending on your volume of e-mail, a regular
56K modem might do just fine at lower cost (or at least it would be lower
cost here in the USA).
If this is the general approach you decide on, you'll want to read up on
procmail and fetchmail to handle (sort and get) the pop3 downloads from the
ISP (pretty straightforward), sendmail configuration to work out how to do
the queueing to avoid extra calls (a bit tricky, that), and diald as one way
to make ISP connections based on demand.
Having said all of this, I'm not convinced that what I've described is the
best approach. If the individual e-mail accounts at the ISP are themselves
costly, you could look into getting a single account with a custom domain
name, having all the mail go to it, downloading it using fetchmail, then
using procmail to sort it all out on the Linux host. Or you might be able to
set up a simple store-and-forward deal with the ISP where one of its servers
acts as an MX backup for your server, then passes on the mail during your
periodic connections.
This should at least give you some idea of what you might want to talk with
your ISP about. And the components I've named, plus ppp itself, are probably
what you'll end up using no matter what specific system you end up with.
For more information --
fetchmail: http://tuxedo.org/~esr/fetchmail/
procmail: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/mail/setup/unix/part3/index.html
diald: http://www.loonie.net/~eschenk/diald.html
sendmail: the O'Reilly "bat" book -- nothing online comes close
ppp: http://metalab.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/PPP-HOWTO.html
I'm afraid I didn't understand your comment about Netscape, so I haven't
really considered that in giving the preceding answer. If you're only
connecting to the Internet 4 times a day, all the copies of Netscape in the
world won't let you surf much. And to do this through a Linux host, you'll
need Netscape on the individual clients, with some firewalling &/or IP
Masquerading software (maybe combined with a caching Web server) on the
Linux host. For more on this stuff, read the IP Masquerading mini-HowTo,
ISP Connectivity mini-HowTo, Firewall HowTo, and the apache docs on setting
up Apache as a caching server (sorry, I don't have a reference on that one).
HOpe this helps. Good luck. I'll be interested in learning what you work out.
At 08:24 AM 3/4/99 -0000, De Croes Francis wrote [abridged]:
>I've got several clients (NT, W95, W98) and one great Nt server.
>And recently, .. one Linux box.
>Mail comes in by ISP.
>Every client has its own modem to connect to the ISP and so to his mailbox.
>Now here is the idea.
>I would like to connect to the ISP with the Linuxbox (as you guessed, quiet
new, RH5.1), and installed thanks to you all. This way, I would like to get
the mailboxes on this Linux-server on my net, so the clients can read mail
without have to connect individual to the ISP. This will reduce telephone
and modem cost, the servers downloads the mail , let's say 4 times a day,
and the clients read there mail localy by connecting to the postoffice on
the Linuxbox. In the future I would like to set up the box with Netscape,
so they can surf this way. At that time I would like to connect the box to
the ISP using an ISDN-line.
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
762 Garland Drive
Palo Alto, CA 94303-3603
650.328.4219 voice [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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