LeeNukes

Well, it looks like Woolworths has finally had its last nail inserted into that red and white coffin of theirs. Woolworths just never seemed to be a company that kept itself upto date, and then they went and thought the answer was moving to a catalogue style system, what idiot thought of that, I hope he/she was booted out shortly after that bad decision.

The website is now no more, and tomorrow the sale starts, essentially its going to be a “get what you can sale” from what I can tell. Once I get there its likely that there will be nothing left but a few bits of dried meat on the carcass of Woolies.

Not sure if I’ll miss Woolworths, it was never fun going into one, always seemed to be about 2-3 tills no matter the size of the store.

EDIT:

Just to backup the comment I made above regarding the Catalogue move, here is a news article dated 20-SEP-2006

Here is the share price of Woolworths compared against the FTSE-100 since 2001:

Good move? Don’t think so. Also, the failing Icelandic banks might have had a big impact on this too seen as not too long ago it looked like an Icelandic company was moving in to acquire Woolworths after securing just over a 6% share.

Thanks to iii.co.uk for the share image.

Today I spent a good few hours working through several different tutorials, how to’s, man pages and I even ventured into the #centos irc channel where I very nearly got kicked out/banned, lets just say me and an OP have different views on how people should be assisted in an IRC channel.

Essentially what I want to achieve is in its simplest form, an email server, hosting several users emails accesible via IMAP with a webmail interface. The email will be collected from one POP3 server and distributed to peoples mailboxes on the server. When people send emails out, they go out through an SMTP Smarthost/relay.

Easy enough to achieve right? Well if so, tell me where I’m going wrong as I’m currently lost in a sea of MTA’s, IMAP servers and SMTP protocols.

I’ve looked at Postfix, Fetchmail, Horde, Dovecot, Squirrelmail, Roundcube and more.

So person A has email that goes to POPSERVER that email needs to be picked up from POPSERVER by MAILSERVER and dropped into person A’s mailbox.

Person A needs to be able to access this email via IMAP and Webmail, but not POP as I don’t want people ferrying their emails off the server.

When person A sends an email through MAILSERVER the email gets sent to their ISP’s SMTP server which as its on one of their IP address ranges it helpfully passes on the email like a helpful little mail bunny.

So why am I having problems? Well first off, I’ve got postfix setup and dovecot. I am led to believe that dovecot handles the IMAP and Postfix handles the SMTP. So am I to believe that Postfix is essentially a mail sender and receiver of the SMTP veriety and Dovecot is an interface for IMAP and POP protocols into the persons Mailbox?

Why so confusing?!

Also, it seems I need to manually setup a .fetchmailrc file that has the details of each persons POP3 account and directions for which mailbox it relates to.

Some of you may wonder why I’m bothering with this setup and why I don’t just use Scalix or Zimbra, trust me, I’m starting to think that would be easier. Essentially though,those solutions have quite a large footprint on the system, and this server is only a P3 with 512MB of RAM. It was once a lowly fileserver, I’m trying to breathe some extra function into it.

Assistance or pointers?