POP is one of several services by which a client like 
Thunderbird or Outlook can retrieve a user's incoming mail from 
their server mailbox.  (IMAP is the next most popular, and 
reading email via a web page instead of a client application  is 
also an option).

  SMTP is the most common way for a client application 
(Thunderbird, Outlook, whatever) to send new messages to the 
email server it knows about.  It is also used by email servers 
to exchange messages, so for instance if I forward this message 
to my gmail account, our campuse email server will use SMTP to 
pass it along to Gmail's server.

  If I've understood you correctly, you don't need to do 
outbound SMTP from the server.  But your server will need to 
accept SMTP from the student computers,and also allow them 
access via POP.  (POP3, technically, but POP2 has been obsolete 
for years now.)

  There are additional tricky parts.  The clients will need to 
be told what mail server to connect to -- that can be by IP 
address.  If you do it that way, the server at least should have 
its address statically assigned or, if you use DHCP, reserved by 
MAC address.
  There is one more wrinkle, and details of how to solve it MAY 
depend on what server software you choose.  The domain name in 
the email addresses -- the part after the @ sign -- needs to be 
recognized by the server as pointing to it.  It *may* be 
possible to omit it entirely, although on the client I use that 
lets me send locally to other email client accounts on my own 
machine and never crosses to the server.  So you will probably 
have to pick SOMETHING to use, preferably something that doesn't 
conflict with anything on the Internet (names ending in ".local" 
are often used for this), and figure out how to tell the email 
server software that addresses in that domain refer to mailboxes 
that are *on this server*.

David Gillett


On 16 Sep 2009 at 18:40, Frederick Navarro wrote:

> I actually have something in my mind.  But I just don't know how to
> implement it.  Did some research over the internet and it said that I
> need to have SMTP and POP3 on that server.  I tried using Argosoft
> Mail Server from download.com, but I don't know what to do next?  The
> only conept I could think of would be, all of us have our own
> thunderbird application or ms-outlook, and when student A sends an
> email to me, I could receive it and vice versa.  Students could email
> other classmates who could connect to our mail server, but all should
> be on a remote LAN, or a disconnected LAN from the internet. 
> Thanks!!!
> 
> Frederick Navarro
> 
>              Do you want to signoff PCSOFT or just change to
>                     Digest mode - visit our web site:
>                    http://freepctech.com/pcsoft.shtml
> 

        The NOSPIN Group has added a new feature on our website,
           web based bulletinboard for questions and answers:
              Visit our sister website at http://nospin.com