[clug] mail server required

[Matthew Hawkins]

Rousak, Boris (Boris.Rousak at actewagl.com.au) wrote:
> Greetings all,
> 
> What do people use as a good Linux based mail server? 
> 
> 1. Need remote POP3 access as well as 
> 2. Some sort of browser access to mail boxes - webmail type setup. 
> 3. Also ability to authenticate against LDAP (open or AD) would be good.
> 4. And if it is well documented, well that would just make my day completely

Postfix as the MTA, its a) fast b) secure c) well documented d) well
supported e) easy to administer.  It supports various mapping types
including LDAP for various portions of its features.  Just on the
subject of documentation, postfix's author, Wietse Venema, believes that
a documentation bug (fault, omission, whatever) is more critical than
any code-related bug!

Squirrelmail is one of the better webmail systems I've used.  It's
lightweight and doesn't hide functionality behind fifteen levels of
mouseclicks.  Most webmail systems will frontend an IMAP server, so
you'll probably need one of those too.  Cyrus and Courier are good
choices.  UW-IMAPd is not ;)  Cyrus has its own internal usernames but
can use SASL so you can hook it into LDAP or perhaps PAM then whatever.
Courier from memory will use PAM.

Finally in this day & age you'll probably want to be running
spamassassin and amavis with some kind of virus scanner.  Pretty much
everyone has Linux versions of their AV software now so its really a
matter of preference.  I use F-Secure Antivirus mainly because the guy
who originally wrote it was a Unix network admin who was tired of
wasting time fixing Microsoft-caused problems when he had no interest in
their platforms.  That's a tad more noble than, say, hiring virus
authors to write new viruses so your product can be the first on the
market with the cure.  I've been impressed with it for many years now, I
will always relate how I had an old copy of F-PROT detect with name and
a full description a virus I'd gotten that the latest up-to-date McAfee
could not even detect.  It is $$$ but the prices are very competitive
and the licensing has an interesting clause (each licensed user is
permitted to take a copy home); Open Systems is the local
distributor.
Both spamassassin and amavis trivially hook into postfix's content
filter system, I suggest using amavis-new as a SMTP daemon and having it
launch spamassassin for the best throughput.  An example of a nice
postfix setup is here:
http://www.stahl.bau.tu-bs.de/~hildeb/postfix/enterprise_spam_tagging.shtml

-- 
Matt
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