Adventures in Mail Servers (or, how I wasted my Sunday afternoon)

I think what I want is pretty simple, or at least, reasonably common. I’m just looking for a couple of programs.

An SMTP server which will accept mail for the accounts at latte.ca, and deliver it to a Maildir of my choosing, and let me send mail through it if, and only if, I’ve logged in with the password to that account. (Being able to define a few aliases would also be nice.)

And an IMAP server which will expose the previously-mentioned Maildir, after I’ve logged in with the password to that account.

And yet, every time I try to set that up, something completely falls over for no particularly understandable reason, and I end up wasting an afternoon (or more) of my life. I had hoped this time would be different, since I decided not to install and configure everything myself, but instead bought a copy of OS X Lion Server which was supposed to do all the hard work for me. I’m not going to enumerate all the problems I ran into, but I will say that I still haven’t managed to get there. I’m just done for tonight.

Anyways, if anyone reading this has a working setup that meets the requirements (and the added requirement of needing to use Dovecot and Postfix, since those are what’s installed), I would love to get a copy of their config files. And in the meantime, I might seriously look into getting a refund for Lion Server, given how badly it’s failed me. :P