I'll be moving about 15 sites over to my Linode and would like to manage email from one central location for all of those domains. I'm guessing Usermin / Webmin is most appropriate for this?

Do I need to install something like Citadel in addition to usermin / webmin?

There is also one client who like to manage his emails himself, for the one domain he has on my server.

- "Managing" includes setting out of office replies, resetting passwords and creating new accounts, all just for his domain.
- Email accounts must be IMAP.
- I'm not interested in cPanel or Plesk but not sure if webmin / usermin / citadel is appropriate for a non technical client? If not, what is an alternative?

EHCP comes highly recommended; would it be useful to install this in addition to the -min suites?

Citadel comes with a web interface where one can control pretty much everything. And then you really don't need webmin from what i understand.

Given gmail apps any thought?

How you do this exactly would depend on what you are trying to accomplish.

For instance, I run a number of websites and wish to get emails to admin@domain1.com and postmaster@domain9.com from a single place.

I have tried two methods to support this requirement.

1. Setup free google apps accounts for the domains and forward MX records to google. This worked, but it was heavy and took a good amount of work to setup.

2. Setup postfix to forward all 'catch-all' email to my existing gmail account. I did this by following these directions.

To help keep things straight in my gmail account that all this mail is forwarded too, I setup postfix to append the domain to my email address. So emails to admin@domain1.com go to myemail+domain1@gmail.com and emails to postmaster@domain9.com go to myemail+domain9@gmail.com.

Then it is super easy to have gmail filters drop emails to specific domains into specific folders/tags. Makes managing a ton of domains with limited email a snap.



Personally, unless providing high-touch email support is your main line of business, I would outsource this. There are just too many companies that do email hosting so good for so cheap its hard to compete with them.

Even free services like Google Apps might take care of 100% of your customers needs. Getting it working is just a few MX and DNS updates away.

That way you won't be running relatively heavy services like email spam detection and antivirus on your linode. It has also been my experience that larger services like gmail don't tend to end up on Spam Block-lists as often, meaning less calls from your customer wondering why his emails aren't being delivered.