I once again throw myself at the mercy of the bearded linux gods.

I'm setting up a server to handle the web/ftp/audio/mail traffic for the student radio station I help out. I've got the first three sorted without any fuss. I'm now looking at mail, the server will eventually have its own domain with the MX records pointing at it. I want the machine to act as a POP3/IMAP server and also I'll need to provide webmail access too. For sending mail I assume you can just forward all requests onto the universities SMTP server.

It's a Gentoo box BTW

What I'd like to know is.

(a) What software do people recommend? I've read howto's using Cyrus and PostFix to send and Fetchmail and Courier to recieve on Gentoo's forum. But the disclaimer on the site said it difficult to scale/maintain when you've got lots of users (we're looking at probably 100 accounts). Also, a lot of these people won't will never actually login to machine.

(b) Once armed with the information for question a, any good books/HOWTOs to get going?

Cyrus scales to thousands of users. That was sort of the point. I'm running it myself for probably no more than 30 users, though.

Maybe it was the way the HOWTO was implementing it.

100 is not lots of users.

FWIW, I really like Cyrus as an IMAP server. Hopefully the docs you read have a good HOWTO on how to set up the authentication, though, as it can be a real pain in the ass.

I like Postfix, too. It's pretty tidy yet has all the options you really need for a MTA. My only other experiences are with Sendmail and qmail, though. I like postfix best of those.

I've got no real suggestions as far as clients, but I'd caution against using fetchmail, solely because if you just download all your mail, you get rid of the advantages of IMAP.

I use Exim (cause it's installed by default in debian; hey why not?) as MTA, Courier for IMAP/POP3, procmail for MDA (where I sort stuff into folders, run spamassassin, ClamAV, etc)

I can recommend Courier; I like it a lot. I don't know how it will scale as I only have 3 users. I tried Cyrus but it seemed odd to me, so I tried Courier. I use SquirrelMail for webmail (which talks IMAP to Courier). I use fetchmail to snag mail from all my other accounts (work, ISP) and deliver them to my local account where procmail sorts them into the appropriate IMAP folder.

I'm not necessarily endorsing this config, but it works very well for me. I've not used anything but Exim so my experience there is limited.

As for clients (other than squirrelmail) I use Evolution (to IMAP), PocketPC (to IMAP over WiFi) and sometimes Pine (to IMAP).

100 is not lots of users.

I know, but it is for us.

One of the advantages to Cyrus is that it does not require that the mail users be related in any way to Unix users. A little bit of reading about Courier implies that that is not the case for it, but I could be wrong. Cyrus will likely be more difficult to set up, but you won't have to have Unix users for any of the Cyrus users. On the other hand, if you've got Unix users for all of your mail users anyway....

Looks like I'm wrong:

The userdb authentication module uses either a GBDM or DB database to map arbitrary userids to maildirs.

Of course, then you add that complexity back in.

You can authenticate using a MySQL backend too. I have one of my mail servers setup like this, and it works flawlessly, and is easier to manage.

I use qmail, vpopmail, BincIMAP and SquirrelMail. I can't answer the number of users question, but qmail is reputed to scale extremely well. I've heard good things about PostFix too, now.

See this page for how I installed my system.

Yeah, there's a HOW-TO for Gentoo on that too.

Yeah, there's a HOW-TO for Gentoo on that too.

That's useful to know -- I'm thinking of moving to Gentoo on my production box, because Debian's just getting older and older.

My notes go a bit further into the ClamAV/SquirrelMail installation than those notes, though.

A relational database is not an authentication system. Ew.

I can recommend Cyrus and Squirrelmail. We're using Cyrus with a Windows DC as an authenticating backend, using pam_smb. In this setup, you don't need user accounts or home directories on the Linux box.

Cyrus IMAP will be included in Fedora Core 2, due in May.

Pim

I just used that howto as well on my system, since I may be scaling up the number of mail users on my newly built server.

Defilitly run Postfix over Sendmail. IMAP wise, I have no experience with Cyrus, but have run Courier with no issues on multiple machines. In any case, use Maildir with IMAP along with a filesystem built to ahve tons of tiny files on it like ReiserFS. The idea of mbox IMAP just scares me about as bad as massive e-mail archives in Outlook .pst files.

I used SquirrelMail for my webmail client, but I've recently switched to V-Webmail. SquirrelMail has a lot of nice functionality, but the interface is crap IMO - no matter how you skin it. V-Webmail has a much cleaner interface and a good bit of functionality.

- trs

I used SquirrelMail for my webmail client, but I've recently switched to V-Webmail.

I was excited until I realized it costs money
It's funny how I am so quick to spend money on some things, but not software (although I'm proud to say I'm no longer a pirate)

Open Webmail is nice.

For $435 it better lick certain parts of my anatomy.

Hi!

In my oppinion cyrus imapd is the best one, it is the clear leader in performance...
I run cyrusimapd, portfix, amavisd-new(virus and spam-scanning), horde/imp(webmail) and openldap.
Dont go the database way to authenticate users, ldap is the future...

One way to go could be the kolab-server, its is the programs I have packaged to work like i.e. microsoft exchange.

Fredrik

There's some really useful info here guys, thanks a lot.

My ISP uses a Webmail system called UebiMiau (it's on sourceforge) the UI looks nice. Has anyone used that?

A relational database is not an authentication system. Ew.

No: it's a place to store data.

There's no reason why you can't use it to store usernames and passwords. LDAP would make more sense, though.

No, sorry - to much spannish(?) for me... :-)

But the Horde-project is very good. You could expand it with postit-notes, memos, calender, ToDo etc.

One other thing, why pop3? Imap is the better one. If you need offline-access then just mark the folders as "offline folders" in the mail-clients - remember harddisk-space is cheap compared to lost mail for users...

Fredrik

There's no definate need for pop3, really its for the sake of compatability with what we've already got. I'll use IMAP on it anyway.

Has anyone seen a hack to IMP to do split pane like most e-mail clients?

This is how I had it on my old server, but the problem is the "hack" to do that was never really official, and seems to have disappeared all togther. I'm trying to move the hack from IMP 2.0 to 3.0, but know it may take some time.

I was excited until I realized it costs money

Oh wow, that's a new development. When I d/l'ed it it was definitely free. Sorry 'bout that.

- trs

i just setup the following Click here

pretty good howto. its pretty straight forward, and all of the packages are in the portage tree. (some you have to unmask in /etc/portage/package.keywords). it will get you to thru a working interface, though i still can't seem to get mailing lists to work right. and i'm not sure about spam protection and av protection yet. haven't tested it with such.

here's the pertaining list from my worldfile
net-mail/autorespond
net-mail/courier-imap
net-mail/dcc
net-mail/ezmlm-idx-mysql
net-mail/f-prot
net-mail/qmail
net-mail/qmail-scanner
net-mail/qmailadmin
net-mail/razor
net-mail/squirrelmail
net-mail/vpopmail

SpamAssassin (in portage) works decently. I set my install up as a daemon, and a systemwide procmail checks all messages first for viruses, then for spam. From there, it gets to the users procmail file (all IMAP users have one to at least move spam to a spam folder). Lastly, once a week I run a scanner SpamAssassin comes with to check every users spam folder. It does this to see what the users have put in there that it might have mised. The program will miss some initially, but over time it gets better. I am already seeing my scores shifting after a few days, like all the bounce message from here have drifted from a 0.8 initially to a 0.5 now.

Right then, I used the Virtual Mailhosting howto on the Gentoo site. I've now IMAP, POP3 and Webmail in clear and over SSL, all in all very happy.

Now I've get everything working except the virtual users. Every time I try to send a mail to a vuser I get an email from Postfix saying it can't find the user (which is because it's not a real user on the system). Could someone else who uses this to explain what they do when they want to add a virtual user, I'm sure it's something really easy I'm missing.