Why is it so difficult!?

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?