Having read what both Anders and Joanne had to
say about setting up a simple mail server at
home, I... um... flipped a coin, and went with
Anders' version. So I followed the summary,
as ammended in the follow-up message.
He was specific about his procedure being
intended for a fresh system with no previous
mail-related config. So... yes... I reformatted
and re-installed SUSE 10.1. Blew away everything,
including /home - the only untouched partition
was /data. I restarted several times while the
installer/updater seemed to be working around the
Online Update problems that plagued the early
days of the release, and I appear to have gotten
all the necessary updates installed. Then I tackled
the mail setup following printouts of Anders'
e-mails with the instructions.
I did as much as I could as root, running SuSEconfig
every time I turned around. As part of that
effort, I created a link to my /data partition,
and (as emphasized by Anders) made very sure that
the target directory had the same ownership and
permissions as the original mail landing spot in /var.
Then I started everything and stood back and let
it rip. I had been piling up mail on my ISP for
some weeks (still am, since I used the 'keep' option
until this is working), so fetchmail went and got
thousands of messages.
I have no idea where they went, but it took more
than half an hour to get them all, via ADSL,
the first time. Thereafter, connections took
a few seconds, so I'm assuming it was getting
mail that hadn't already been retrieved in the
first lengthy batch.
I started Thunderbird to connect to Cyrus on
the same machine. I answered its initial questions
with responses that made sense to me at the time.
At first it wouldn't connect, so I tweaked saslauth
config and tried again. Thunderbird prompted for
my password and then made satisfied noises, but
no mail appeared in my INBOX (in Thunderbird).
I spent a few hours reading stuff in the Cyrus
docs and didn't really find anything that I was
sure I should be tweaking, so I tried something
else.
I figure that all the downloading activity meant
I must have thousands of messages SOMEwhere, and
I tried to find 'em. I know that Cyrus doesn't
use /Maildir, but I read that it _does_ store
messages as individual files, and uses databases
to handle all the meta info. I looked every place
I could imagine, on both /var and my /data partition,
as well as in /home (just in case), to no avail.
If I've got a load of downloaded mail somewhere,
it's well hidden.
Meanwhile, I came into my office this morning
and found dozens of bounce mails, from all the stuff
that I'd sent/forwarded from office to home over the
past several weeks. They looked like this:
****************************************************
Subject: Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender
This is the Postfix program at host junkbox.OURHOUSE.
I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not
be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.
For further assistance, please send mail to <postmaster>
If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the attached returned message.
The Postfix program