Need a PRO's Help Please

[Mcraez]

Hi there guys, I am trying to do a tricking thing here if anyone can give me some knowledge that would be great. OK so what I am trying to do is I have a POP SMTP email account with my ISP here at my home. When I go to my cottage up north I have nothing for email just a phone line and no dial up server providers. What I would like to do is set up a mail server machine here at home with my ISP cable connection and be able to retrieve email from the server over phone line. The server machine would have a modem as well as the cottage machine. I know this is a tall request but is it possible. I do know a little about Linux and used BBS years ago when I was 13 years old.


Thanks
Mike

[YeOldeStonecat]

If no ISPs service the area your cottage is located, with a local number...I'd look for a toll free dial up service provider. There are quite a few to choose from, even some bigger names like AT&T provide this.

Once connected...hopefully your main ISP from home has web based e-mail access.

[dazzaf]

get a mobile phone that can collect pop email.. i have a nokia 6280 and i can get my email from anywere in the world

if not you should be able to use oulook express with the pop and smtp details to collect but as stated you will need even the most basic of internet connections

[malus]

I am thinking about doing something along these lines myself. In my case the idea is twofold:

1. I want to filter out spam before I have to see it.
2. I want to avoid my wife pulling down my email to her machine and me visa-versa from our single mail account - plus it would be nice to allow us to pull down selected items that *both* of us would like to have copies of.

The idea is to set up a linux box dedicated for this purpose (maybe a spare AMD machine I have laying around will suffice). I would load Sendmail, and use Fetchmail to automate popping the main account down regularly (set up in a crontab). I've got some ideas about building my own spaminator...heheh...we'll skip that for your purposes.

For remote access, you will set up a PPP server on a box on your 'home' network (this can be your mail server, or another box if you want better security). You would set up a PPP client on your remote machine to talk to this server. http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/PPP-HOWTO/x156.html -- provides instructions for setting up a PPP server on a linux box. If your remote machine is a Linux box - there are also instructions within that document for setting up a client. http://www.udel.edu/topics/connect/ppp/XP/index.html --- provides instructions for setting up a ppp client under Windows XP (replace the university's info with your own server info).

The bad news is the dial-up connection is a security hole. Nonetheless you could ameliorate that by setting up a secure tunnel between the dial-up machines - using SSH you could lock out anyone without your specific key --- so you could pop your email down from your sendmail setup as desired. Howto provide a full blown VPN host server.

I'll leave the details as an exersize for the reader...