I'm on the Debian small system, and trying to decide on a MTA. I've pretty much decided against sendmail, and have played around with exim and qmail. I've found all of them a bit hard to set up. The end result I'm looking for is to connect to SMTP and IMAP via SSL, and have web access (probably via Squirrelmail) and eventually spam filtering and virus scanning and removal. It has to support virtual domains, preferably in a fairly transparent manner.

What are your recommendations? What are you all using?

_________________
John Schofield
Apple Certified Technical Coordinator
Office Mechanic Consulting
Mac, Unix, and PC Computer Support
www.officemechanic.com

I highly recommend courier.

http://courier-mta.org

Has a full suite, smtp, imap etc. Includes a cgi for web based admin and is /very/ easy to setup and use. Oh, also has it's own server side filtering MDA called maildrop. I'm planning on eventually writing a howto for setting it up with dspam. I'd be glad to help with any problems you have with it. You can find me in #linode on irc.oftc.net.

www.lifewithqmail.org is an easy, step by step setup of qmail.

Kenny

I'm all for qmail + vpopmail. Quite easy to setup and does what I want. Although I must admit I haven't got aroudn to set it up right now, it was what I was using about a yr ago


Erik[/url]

_________________
Acid-Duck@IRC [EFNet]
erik.godin At n0sp4m.sympatico.ca

Hi

I run: Postfix + TLS/SSL + SMTP-AUTH + amavisd-new + SpamAssassin + Clamav + virtual domains ... :^)

I have compiled all of the above *totally* by source on debian woody as well.

I have been working on the following HOWTO ...

http://www.opencurve.org/~sunny/nix/postfix/

It *isn't* done yet, but there is quite a bit up, and I've been working on it day by day.

I believe postfix is a much better idea than qmail for a few various reasons. First postfix is 100% free software, qmail is not. Secondly postfix is rather secure itself. Thirdly postfix is easy to get going and doesn't require the need to install additional BS software. And lastly, postfix supports many features natively, while with Qmail such features must come from 3rd party patches not part of the core codebase.

As for an IMAP server, I run Courier-IMAP. It supports IMAP/SSL and POP3/SSL. The documentation that comes with Courier-IMAP is rather good and so setup is pretty easy. If you are going to choose Courier-IMAP just tell me, and I can share my two tips about CI's redhat centric PAM configuration (easy stuff), and making sure CI generates SSL certs with your info instead of generic info (easy as well.)

Sunny Dubey

PS: Future Tip: If you find yourself using Cyrus-SASL for authentication you may definately want to google for "pam_realm": http://only.mawhrin.net/~mss/thingies/pam-realm/ You'll see what I'm taking about in the future if you decide to use such software :^)[/img]

I'm speechless....

Auh heck, just google for postfix, qmail, flame war, I hate Dan Bernstein, etc.. spend about an hour reading whatever you find then just pretend I posted it here.

Kenny

Sorry, I mistyped something in my original post (which has now been edited)

I've been trying for a couple weeks (not as bad as it sounds, I have a minimal amount of time a day to spend on this) now to get a mail server setup on Debian with virtual hosting. Is this at all possible with standard woody packages? I've built plenty of linux boxes from scratch so compiling stuff isn't the problem I would rather just stick with a simple apt-get upgrade to keep everything up to date.

Thanks to anyone who can point me in the right direction.

I'm using the same reasoning for staying away from qmail and anything that isn't Debian "native." This is not because of any allegiance to any weird geek ideology, but because it seems that Debian works best when you stick with pure Debian packages. Like you, I want to be able to update everything with apt-get update and not have to worry about having to manually apply patches to certain programs.

You can read how I set my Linode up at http://www.officemechanic.com/publications/lampramp

I can not emphasize enough that this is not an installation manual yet, but a braindump of how I'm putting my server together. I've found exim to be very easy to install -- it has a config script that asks all the questions I think it ought to ask -- but I have not yet tested it out completely. (Like you, this isn't my primary job -- finding time can be a problem.)

Any comments from folks? Anybody recoiling in horror at the mention of exim / uwimap on Debian?

I'm certainly open to any suggestion that will keep apt-get update working on my system.

_________________
John Schofield

Apple Certified Technical Coordinator

Office Mechanic Consulting

Mac, Unix, and PC Computer Support

www.officemechanic.com

Sunny,

I installed basically the same setup (plus courier and imp), I installed it all from the sid repository without compiling a single program. Since I know I will never get around to keeping the packages I compile from source up to date, it is important that I can update it all with an apt-get update/upgrade...