# Before I start; is this possible IMAP server



## mrhobbeys (Jul 13, 2012)

I am trying to find a good solution for my grandparents business, and I have an idea that seems ok.

Use FreeBSD to download mail from the internet server, then server that mail to my grandmother's and her secretary's computers at the same time via IMAP. They both have windows outlook 2007, and from what I can tell I think IMAP is what I want. 

The goal is to share emails and any changes to emails, and if possible the other functions of outlook, although for this I have tried to show my grandmother several times and she does not use any of them ie., tasks, calendar, etc.

So will FreeBSD do what I want here?

Is this even the right services and direction to move in?

I am at their place right now trying to fix Quickbooks, and see if I can set this up, if you give me the green light I will right away install FreeBSD on my old laptop that I leave up here.

Also someone from another business told my grandmother she needed Exchange server, but I thought she might have had a small heart attack when she heard the price so I am trying to find something that will either be free or very very inexpensive.


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## SirDice (Jul 13, 2012)

From what I can tell IMAP looks like a good solution. A central server where all the mail goes in and out. IMAP will leave the mail on the server and allow you to make folders. Having mail centralized makes backing it up easy too.

I think the most popular choices are mail/dovecot and mail/courier.


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## mrhobbeys (Jul 13, 2012)

I've been doing some searching on the forums and I have come up with the following list:

postfix
dovecot
sieve
fetchmail
squirellmail
roundcube
nginx
fetchmailrc
ripmine

I've tried searching them in the online man pages so I could read some more about each, but I guess I am not looking in the right place at all. Googleing most of these seems less than efficient, and leaves a lot to desire. Is that my only option to learn more?


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## mrhobbeys (Jul 13, 2012)

Like this post:

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=10728&highlight=outlook

Why is he using PostgreSQL?

It seems that this post may come close to what I am trying to do but has to many "extras". I'm still making my system images so I have not even started installing anything yet.


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## mrhobbeys (Jul 13, 2012)

After thinking about it I am going to use the guide I just linked to, he is doing the all the other stuff that I wanted to do but forgot to mention like running everything in jail..

As of right now my computer has the following features and I want to see if I will run into any serious problems:

Dell Latitude C610
1200MHz Intel 
256MB ram
40GB HD

My grandparents business only has one email address that would be using this server so it is hard for me to think that it would use more than 40GB, in other words the business is rather small especially on the electronic front, but what kind of trouble is it to to expand to say an external USB drive later, or to do something like clonzilla or rsync the drive and just change to a larger one later?
Will I have enough ram and CPU to run all of the daemons mentioned in the other post while handling mail?


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## mrhobbeys (Jul 14, 2012)

I'm stuck, or more to the point not exactly sure where to go from here. I started in on the tutorial posted above and have not been able to create a jail yet...


***Edit/addition

Why would I not have the file /boot/loader.conf ?

I get a no such file error even when I just try and cd to that location and use ls I see a loader file, but not loader.conf


***Edit/addition 2

Ok, I just figured it out, I feel smart for the next 10min


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## vermaden (Jul 14, 2012)

mrhobbeys said:
			
		

> outlook 2007, and from what I can tell I think IMAP is what I want.



Outlook 2007 (and 2010) are probably the worst possible IMAP clients.

There was business that needed one single account with several IMAP clients attached simultaneously but their requirement was Outlook 2003/2007/2010, it was a massacre because Outlook CAN NOT have IMAP account as main account, it HAS to be POP3 (even local) and then You can attach IMAP to it, but the scripts they were using only work for the default account ... 

If You can, stay away from that sh!t (Outlook).


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