Linux Email Server

[Darin Perusich]

setting up a email subsystem is not a trivial affair. unless there is an 
existing infrasctucture, it may not be as easy as just setting up the 
services on a machine.

before we go any further i do have a few questions.

do you want to setup a domain for yourself, lets say jacobstoll.com for 
the sake of discussion and have all your email go there?

would it be acceptable to have messages go to an existing POP account at 
your ISP, pull those message to your email machine, send email back 
through your ISP?

as for the software to use...

for SMTP services there's the venerable sendmail. i've never used 
anything other then sendmail so i don't feel that i'm qualified to 
comment on the others. but i will say that my sendmail gateway has 
uptime of 417 days.

to POP or to IMAP, which do you want to do? if you're going to go to the 
trouble of hosting your own email i'd use imap. pop is easier to setup 
but with imap your messages will be in a central location. you'll be 
able to check your message from any machine with an email client.

for POP qpopper is a powerful solution if you have many pop users. if 
it's just you the pop daemon that comes with mandrake should be fine.

for IMAP i like the Cyrus IMAPd, http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus. the other 
solution is the WU IMAPd, http://www.washington.edu/imap. 
http://www.imap.org/ has tons of information on imap. again i've never 
used WU IMAPd so i can't really comment. Both are powerful solutions though.


Jacob Stoll wrote:
> Does any one know of a good free email server on mandrake linux 8.1 that 
> requires almost no admistration to it and requires no almost knowlege of 
> pop, imap etc. I am trying to drop my 3rd party email service because 
> they basicly control everything.
> 
> --------------------------------------------------
> Thanks for any suggestions.
> Jacob Stoll - jstolly92 at netscape.net
> http://sycoris.homelinux.com
> 


-- 
Darin Perusich
Unix Systems Administrator
Cognigen Corp.
darinper at cognigencorp.com