Email Service Question

[stryder144]

Since I will be going home soon, I have been thinking about some email related issues that my wife (primarily) has. She seriously has a hard time making time to check her email. Since her email service has a scant 2mb of storage and a policy of deleting users who don't log on at least once a month, I've been thinking about implementing a local email server that will download her (and possibly my) web-based email periodically. This is the easiest part of the whole idea.

The only thing that I think my wife would object to is not being able to check her email if she is away from home (all messages, even the old ones, which makes turning off the process that logs onto, checks and downloads new messages when she is away a bad idea). So, I was wondering if there is a good program that would allow the downloaded emails to be viewed online from the email server that would be located in my house?

The chain of events would go something like this: The server would log into, say, Yahoo! Mail, download the messages and delete the email on the remote server, place the messages in an inbox that would have the userid and password that the web email server required (makes things easier on my wife, which makes it easier to sell to her in the first place). Now, she could access the inbox via her favorite email client from another computer that is attached to our home LAN. Or, if she was at her parents house on vacation, she could access the inbox via a web interface. The only problem I see with this is that the IP address for the home connection would probably be dynamic. Is there a way around that problem, as well (one that would be easy enough for a near computer-phobe to be able to handle)?

Any suggestions for how I could implement something like this? I really want to make things easy on my wife, so any workable suggestions would be greatly appreciated. This solution seems to be the best one that I can think of that allows me to host her email on a local computer yet makes the email available to her no matter where she goes. Not to mention, some bases do not allow me to have access to common web-based email services, so having my email collected to that computer and served up via a web-interface would be beneficial to me, too.

Thanks,

Cheers

[demian]

If the IP address thingy is the only issue: That's not a problem. Get an account at dyndns or a similar service and youre computer can be reached at any time by the name you choose (like stryder.kicks-ass.org or yadayayday.homeunix.net or something). As for the rest that's pretty straight-forward to: Use fetchmail, to retrieve the mail and deliver it to your MTA (exim's good) then have an imap server running like cyrus to access the mail from either some email proggy or via squirelmail or some other web interface.

As a matter of fact that's how I use email at home and it works like a charm.

[stryder144]

Thanks, Demian, I'll research your suggestions.

Cheers

[trickster]

I want to do exactly that, but I have absolutely no idea how to accomplish it.

I'd be great if any of you guys would post a PET *Hint*

[demian]

[quote author=trickster link=board=4;threadid=9074;start=0#msg82126 date=1082594104]
I want to do exactly that, but I have absolutely no idea how to accomplish it.

I'd be great if any of you guys would post a PET *Hint*
[/quote]
*hmms*

Well, I'm really busy right now but I might be able to squeeze that in. Until then everybody start of with installing fetchmail and have it dump your emails to an MTA and then to some mailbox. Configuring the MTA might not even be neccessary cause most distros set it up so that it already listens to port 25 and dumps mail for user joe to /var/mail/joe.
If that's done the hard part is over.