[kolacs]

Hi there! I would like to be able to store all of my e-mail (from any of several ISPs) on a Linux box and view it from any workstation on my LAN using whatever mail client suits my fancy.

I have managed to set up pop3 and fetchmail on the Linux server so it does collect all my mail from the Internet and stores it in /var/mail/username. I can view it using a text editor and it shows up OK in Pine/Elm/&c.

However, when I use my Windows XP machine to check the Linux server for mail, Mozilla's mail client gives me the error "Cannot connect to server [Linuxbox]; the connection was refused". Is there a setting or configuration file I missed on the Linux box that will allow remote mail clients on the LAN to access the mail?

Please note: My Linux box can't run a GUI so I am relegated to character-based utilities.

Thanks for your help!

[fractilian]

It could be alot of things here are a few:
do you have the right port # setup
permissions
do your linux machines an win machines talk(is samba and all that good stuff going)
thats all i can think of at the moment. Check those things out and see.

[kolacs]

thanks for the suggestions - here's what i found:

my port # in Mozilla is 110 (the default); how do i know if it should be different? (i'm kind of a newbie at this)

i set up a samba share that lets me access /var/mail and i can read the mail file from the XP machine using notepad. i still get the same error when i check mail in Mozilla, though.

[ed209]

In order to use a pop3 client (outlook/evolution/etc) there has to be a pop3 server to answer the request. You are missing the server on your linux box. Fetchmail has collected the mail to a filesystem location but with out a server listening on port 110 ( pop3 ) your outlook will never be able to download the collected messages.

There are numerous pop3 servers available to linux, I personally use qmail written by Dan Bernstein:

http://cr.yp.to/qmail.html

But I am considering changing to postfix:

http://www.postfix.org/

you probably don't need most of the features of these two servers though so you could use pretty much anyone of the plethora of servers out there.

You may have to change how you collect your mail with fetchmail as well. You need to make sure its in a format the server expects. Other than that it should work.

ed