Summary: I'm doing a lot of backtracking in my simple little quest, because the task keeps getting interrupted for weeks at a stretch. Anyway, I'm still trying to set up a simple mail server in my tiny home network. I have the following picture in my head: - fetchmail grabs mail from my ISP's POP3 server and hands it off to... - some interim mail handling service/app and - magic happens, before - an imap server catches and holds that mail and serves it out to my clients on a couple of other computers at my house. I have not gotten past stage 1 yet. Yesterday, I ran one pass of fetchmail (with --keep) just to see what would happen. What happened is that 1545 messages came in, over a period of several minutes and went.... somewhere... I figure that they are on my hard disk somewhere in either MBOX format or maildir format (or maybe even mailboxes.db, but I doubt it) and: a) I don't know where they went. b) I don't know what format. QUESTION: What's the most straightforward way to find all that mail (before it gets mysteriously flushed or something), so I can begin to piece together how it's being handled now and what to do to have it handled the way I need? QUESTION 2: With only a few users on a few machines, and maybe a couple of hundred thousand messages stored for IMAP serving, is my best server option: - plain, vanilla imap - courier-imap - Cyrus-imap I understand that each of these also has preferred mailbox formats, so where in the mail trail does the incoming mail get mushed into one or another format? It seems to come from the ISP as single files, so I ASSume that the "conversion" to MBOX or maildir or [other option?] takes place either in fetchmail in the next app that handles the mail (procmail? sendmail? postfix?) before it reaches the resting place that imap will use. As for choosing a flavor of IMAP, I just don't know. I don't really want to get into setting up additional authentication databases (sasl? LDAP? other?), but if that would be simpler than the PAM or shadow requirements... well maybe... Last night, I had 22 browser windows open with a variety of Howtos and FAQs (many contradicting each other) for fetchmail, imap, Cyrus-imap, courier-imap, procmail, postfix, sendmail, qmail (no, I don't think I have qmail installed, but...). Basically I have an overload of info and an underload of knowledge or direction. I gave up and went to bed a 2:30 ... and got up at 5:30... oi! Kevin The information contained in this electronic mail transmission may be privileged and confidential, and therefore, protected from disclosure. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to this message and deleting it from your computer without copying or disclosing it.