Linux Mail Server Setup and Howto Guide

Hi All

I'm not an IT professional so I'm afraid I'm not completely clear on how the e-mail system works or what the various parts of the system actually do, but perhaps you'll bear with me:-

We have a small company which currently has what you could call a standard mail system – our email adresses are hosted by a web hosting company and each of our staff downloads their mail to their own PC using a standard POP3 client (Outlook Express)

I'd like to centralise our system so that all mail is downloaded to a server in our office (which acts as a safe and secure repository, and can be routinely backed up) and which each member of staff then accesses, presumably using an HTML type client. (In other words, a 'Hard Copy' of the messages remains on our server.)

I don't want to take over the responsibilities of the hosting company, merely the storage and administration of the messages once they've arrived on our premises.

From what I can gather, a linux IMAP server,running say, Squirrel mail, will download messages in POP3 format from the 'hosted server' and allow them to be accessed by our staff using IMAP clients (or even accessed from a remote location ??)

Just a few pointers please – have I misunderstood the principles ?  Is what I'm trying to achieve feasible ?  and, if an IMAP server is what i need, will the same server be able to function simultaneously as a samba file server for storing drawing files etc. ? 

(There are only four or five  users in our company, so our combined demands are modest)

Thanks in anticipation,

Glenn.

So, (and please forgive my haphazard terminology) I need to contact my current email server provider and ask if they can forward our mail 'by SMTP' to our own server(where it wil be 'received' by Postfix + courier or dovecot), whilst still allowing us to forward our outgoing mail by SMTP to their server (so that it can take care of queueing etc.) for delivery.

Is this getting closer to the correct approach, or am I still well out of my depth……

Thanks,

Glenn.