"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

1 Introduction

• users on the network can send local mail to each other, and reply to it, also locally.
• outgoing mail has a proper From: address, so the outside world can reply to it.
• the e-mail account is shared by the users, but each only receives his/her personal mail.
• users on the network receive a notification (a pop-up window) when personal mail for them arrives.

This is realized on my system (running Debian Linux 2.1) using the following programs:

• exim as the mail transfer agent (it is much easier to configure than sendmail).
• fetchmail for collecting the mail from the ISP.
• pine as the mail client on the Linux side (but other clients can be used as well, including mail).
• Microsoft Internet Mail on the Windows side (but other clients can be used as well).
• qpopper as the POP3 server, for moving mail from the Linux system to the Win95 machine.
• smbclient and Winpopup for mail notification.

I have this set up for two machines (1 Linux + 1 Win95) but it will probably also work for a somewhat larger network, and may be sufficient for a small office. Note: this article is Debian-oriented. If you use another distribution, change where appropriate!

2 The network and the names

• the owner / system administrator is called Joe Bloggs.
• the Linux machine is called heaven.
• the Win95 machine is called earth. It is mostly used by Emily Bloggs.
• Joe's user name on heaven is joe.
• Emily's user name on heaven is emi.
• Emily's user name on earth is also emi; her Linux password on heaven and her 'password for Microsoft networking' on earth are the same.
• Joe has a dialup account (dynamic IP address) with an ISP called isp.com. Mail from the ISP can be collected using POP3.
• Joe's account name at the ISP is jbloggs.
• Joe's e-mail address (also used by Emily) is [email protected].
• Joe's password for collecting POP3 mail is zaphod.
• The ISP's mail server (for sending mail) is smtp.isp.com.
• The ISP's POP3 server (for collecting mail) is pop3.isp.com.
• heaven and earth belong to a domain called home. This domain name is meant for use only inside the home network; Joe has not registered his domain name and it cannot be recognized by the outside world.

/etc/hostname on heaven is

heaven

/etc/hosts on heaven is

127.0.0.1 localhost
192.168.1.1 heaven.home heaven
192.168.1.2 earth.home earth

On earth there is a file c:\windows\hosts with the same contents as /etc/hosts.

3 Mail addresses

To: Emily Bloggs <[email protected]>

'Emily Bloggs' in the above example is the 'real-name part'. It is set in the e-mail program which composes the message. This 'real-name part' can be used for delivering Emily's mail to her. Note: if the 'real-name part' has dots in it, it must be quoted using " characters ("Joe C. Bloggs"). See also man mailaddr.

4 Configuring exim

• your system is an Internet site using smarthost.
• the 'visible mail domain' is home
• other names apart from home and heaven.home: answer heaven:localhost
• you don't want to relay for any non-local domains.
• you want to relay for the local network 192.168.1.0/16
• RBL (spam filter database): whatever you like. I said n
• The smarthost, handling outgoing mail, is smtp.isp.com
• System administrator mail should go to joe (not to root!)

On the Linux side, nothing special has to be set. /etc/pine/conf and the users' ~/.pinerc can be used 'out of the box'. The mail client (pine) constructs local addresses using the hostname together with user information from /etc/passwd.

With the above setup, local users can happily send mail to each other and reply to it. For instance, in pine at heaven, user joe sends mail to user emi. Automatically, pine changes this to:

To: Emily Bloggs <[email protected]>

The message is delivered immediately (as you can see if you run eximon, the exim monitoring utility). emi (should she log in to heaven) would see the message as coming from

From: Joe Bloggs <joe@home>

So home really functions like a local domain within which messages can be exchanged. The problem is sending messages to the outside world. A From: address like <joe@home> is no good because nobody on the outside could reply to an address in the non-existent domain home.

5 Fixing the From: address

The following filter will do the trick, provided we are sure that the address that we want to change is always between < and > signs. This is not guaranteed, but very common: pine, mutt, and mail, as well as MS Internet Mail all generate such addresses.

#!/usr/bin/perl
$address = '[email protected]';
while (<>) {
    if (/^From: /) { s/<.*>/<$address>/; print; last; }
    print; }
while (<>) { print; }

remote_smtp:
   driver = smtp
   headers_remove = "sender"
   transport_filter = "/usr/local/bin/outfilt"
end

With these changes to /etc/exim.conf, whenever anyone sends an e-mail message to the outside world it is now delivered properly by exim. Exim (through diald) opens the outside line at once. In a home situation this is probably what you want. In a small office, with a lot of e-mail traffic, you may want to defer messages and send them as a bunch at certain times, to save phone costs. This is possible, but I don't need it myself and have not looked into it. You could look at the 'Linux Mail-Queue mini-HOWTO'.

6 Fetchmail configuration

# Configuration created Sun Mar 28 03:15:20 1999 by fetchmailconf
set postmaster "postmaster"
poll pop3.isp.com with proto POP3
       user "jbloggs" there with password "zaphod" is joe here options fetchall warnings 3600

The main point is that whoever runs fetchmail, the mail must always be delivered to the same user mailbox (joe's mailbox in this case).

7 Removing exim's delivery limit

smtp_accept_queue_per_connection = 0

8 Delivering personal mail

# Exim filter
if $header_to: contains Emily then deliver emi endif

The .forward file must have permissions -rw-r--r--. If you're not sure, give the command chmod 644 .forward.

If mail contains 'Emily' in (the 'real name part' of) the To: address (and this will almost always be the case when her friends send her mail) it will now go into her mail account on heaven, not into Joe's. She can move the mail to her own machine using POP3 (see below).

Delivery to other users than Emily can be arranged with elif ... then clauses in the .forward file. Actually, exim's .forward files can perform a lot of complicated functions. See the text "Exim's user interface to mail filtering" which comes with the exim doc's.

9 Transferring mail with qpopper

10 Automatic mail notification

Joe (as root) has put a Perl program called mailwarn into usr/local/bin:

#!/usr/bin/perl
open  POPUP, "| smbclient -M $ARGV[0] >/dev/null 2>&1";
print POPUP "YOU'VE GOT MAIL! GO AND CHECK IT!\n";
print POPUP "It's from $ARGV[1]";
close POPUP; 

This file was, of course, first made executable using chmod +x mailwarn.

In Emily's home directory at heaven there is now also also a .forward file (emi is the owner; permissions are 644):

# Exim filter
unseen pipe "/usr/local/bin/mailwarn earth $header_from:"

If mail (local or from the outside) for Emily arrives at heaven, a window will now pop up on earth telling her this.

11 Manually collecting the outside mail