[plug] Small office email problems

[Kevin Shackleton]

I have a problem with email provision for four users in a small office scenario.

Our dial-up network connection works relatively well (50 kbps) and we have had no
problems with running a Windows machine dialing up and getting our email from
Bigpond using Outlook 2k.

I have now set up a network with a Linux machine (RedHat 7.1) functioning as the
PPP gateway.

Web access works fine using squid - no trouble getting 1 MB files out to networked
clients.

I set up accessability to mail.bigpond.com by adding a MASQ rule to ipchains
forwarding.  I have not set up an MTA.  The setup works for test files but appears
to time out with typical (30 KB) emails, with all clients using Win98 and Outlook
2k.

There appears to be two approaches to get email to work - overcome the MASQ
timeout issue (if that's really what the problem is) or set up sendmail to
(hopefully) overcome timeout issues.

I've not set up sendmail before and could not find a recipe for a simple relaying
configuration.

I'd be keen to liaise with someone with expertise in this area of configuration -
either effective MASQ'ing or MTA'ing.

Thanks,

K.