[TriLUG] Mail Server options.

Mon Jan 14 01:15:08 EST 2002

Hi Rick,

It's always nice to see someone trying to learn something new.  First,
it appears you have a few things confused.  Unfortunately, that's
not hard to do.  What, with all the 3 letter acronyms like MTA, MDA,
etc.. it's sometimes hard to figure out what's what.

First of all, you said you'd like to have pop3, webmail, mailing list,
anti virus scanning, and real time blacklisting.  None of these will
really be provided with an MTA, or mail transport agent, which is what
sendmail, qmail, postfix and exim are.  A mail transport agent just
picks up the mail that comes to you, and sends out the mail you send
to other people.  Other programs handle all the other things.  While
it is true that qmail comes with some of these other programs, it's 
important to keep the distinction.

As far as mail transport agents are concerned, qmail, postfix, and
even exim are all very fine programs.  They will do whatever you
want to do.  I personally use qmail, but I know lots of people
that use either postfix or exim.  A few Linux distributions
these days are providing postfix as the default so that might
be something to consider there.

One of the things you need to consider about an MTA is
what format will it store mail in.  Qmail, by default,
stores e-mail using the "Maildir" format.  This format
uses a directory to represent a mailbox, and each message
is separate file.  Most of the others use the default
unix way of representing an mailbox which is one file
with multiple messages in the file.  This is often
called the mbox format.  I know postfix and exim can 
also do Maildir format.  This becomes important
later because some programs you need to do the rest
of what you want to do use one format or the other.
Others can give you the technical merits of each
type, but either one will certainly work.

As far as pop3 (and I would also suggest looking at imap), 
probably the most used program would be the University of Washington
IMAP.  UW IMAP provides pop3 and imap services and 
works with the standard unix mailbox format.  
If you're using Maildir format, you could look 
into using the Courier Imap server (I don't know if
it does pop or not).  One other server is the
Cyrus server which provides pop and imap, but
doesn't work with the standard unix user
tools.

You mention squirrel mail below along with
qmail, postfix, and exim.  Squirrelmail is actually
a program that provides web based access to your
e-mail.  Squirrelmail works very nicely but I
actually prefer another program: IMP (http://www.horde.org/).
IMP (Internet Mail Program?) provides web
access to your e-mail using the IMAP protocol.
Either one will do what you want it to.

As far as a mailing list goes, ezmlm works directly
with qmail, but is a little obscure to setup and use.
Majordomo is the canonical mailing list program, but
I think you would probably be better served
with the same program trilug uses for it's mailing
lists: GNU Mailman (http://www.list.org).

For real-time virus scanning, I don't actually 
know of any products to do this on unix, since
unix seems to be more resistant to virii than
MS Windows.  Perhaps some others can suggest something?

Finally, for real-time black listing, this *is*
usually integrated directly into the MTA.  I would
question, however, the utility of rbl.  I personally
don't think that closing yourself off to a large
portion of the Internet is that good of a thing,
especially if you're running a mailing list.  I
run a mailing list (The SCA Kingdom of Atlantia
e-mail list) that was hosted for a while
somewhere that used RBL and my users had more
problems with that than anything else (nothing
against the guys who hosted the mailing lists,
they were great!).  I was always getting
e-mail from people complaining they couldn't
post to the list.  For a mailing list, I would
suggest a better way to keep down spam is to
restrict the list to members only posting. 
Mailman has a very nice interface so that
if someone does post to the list from an 
unsubscribed e-mail you can easily review
the posting and decide whether to let it through
or not.

So, I think I touched on everything you said you
wanted.  If you have any more questions, please
feel free to ask.

Tanner Lovelace
P.S. Rick, my wife says she thinks she remembers
you from when she was at Duke (1986-1990) so she
said to say that Janell Lehmann says hello.

On Sun, 2002-01-13 at 23:55, Rick Steeves wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm currently working at getting to know mail servers, and towards that end 
> am starting in on trying to get a mail server set up for my own personal 
> use. Currently the box is RedHat 7.2, primarily because that's the most use 
> to me at work.
> 
> Everything I read about sendmail is kinda scary (not being a linux expert), 
> so I've been looking at other options. The two I've looked at in reasonable 
> depth are qmail and postfix, with a brief review of squirrelmail and exim 
> (which seem too limited to me).
> 
> Of them all, qmail seems more like what I want, but I thought I'd see what 
> experience others have had with it. Things I'd like to accomplish:
> pop3 mail, web mail (both preferably with a secure connection), mailing 
> list, Antivirus scanning, real time blacklisting.
> 
> qmail seems to have those functions built in (a theoretical plus) or have 
> other apps that will accomplish that (amavis for antivirus, omail for web 
> mail, rbl/MAPS for blacklisting). Minuses are that some of the add-ons for 
> qmail appear to be only for Unix, not linux, and I don't have the knowledge 
> to get between the two.
> 
> Any other thoughts?
> 
> Thanks
> Rick
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Rick Steeves
> ricks at duke.edu                          http://www.sinister.net
> 
> _______________________________________________
> TriLUG mailing list
> http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug
-- 
Tanner Lovelace | lovelace at wayfarer.org | http://wtl.wayfarer.org/
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 order, will lose both and deserve neither.  --  Benjamin Franklin 

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