Mail servers :(

[Paddy]

I spent the day playing with the home network. I was trying to get my internet server, which is currently running 2Kserver, to download all my pop3 mail and send it to my exchange mailbox.

After hours of rewiring my phone sockets and setting up exchange I finally realised that it is not possible for exchange to do this out of the box. Doh! M$ have a pop3 connector but it is only for SBS... Anyway, 2Kserver and Exchange are huge overkills for what i want to do, so I have decided to move into the unknown.

Hello Linux.

I suppose what i want to know is, is there a prefered linux GUI?? I hear Mandrake is quite friendly for Windows converts... Also, would Apache be the best bet for a mail server??? Any suggestions would be most welcome

TIA!

[Paddy]

hmm... the servers are playing up a bit...

*bump*

[Paddy]

*bump*

No Joy....

Perhaps i should explain a little more as to what i want the mail server to do??? I want it to download mail from various accounts and then store it so that I can access it from a client machine. It would also be usefull if i could connect to the mail server from the internet... The idea being that I do not have to trudge through several 'webmail' accounts when i am not at my home PC

[Duty]

One of these might help...

http://www.youngzsoft.com/en/index.html

http://www.netcplus.com/smartserver.htm

http://www.pppindia.com/intl/netmailshar/

http://www.1cis.com/articles/1cms20pr.asp

Jeff

[Paddy]

Thanks Jeff, I'll check them now

[Colin Morey]

um, apache is a webserver, not a mailserver.

if you want something to download your email, take a look at "fetchmail" for sorting i'd recommend "procmail" the actual server program can be one of many, for example qmail, sendmail(bad security history, but aparently they're getting better, but it's still a pig to configure imho) and exim,(i'd recommend exim).
if you get stuck, ask in the alt forum,.

[orangejulius]

I'd recommend <a href="http://www.postfix.org/">Postfix</a>. Beats sendmail in every category -- performance, anti-spam features, reliability.

For instance, I enabled <a href="http://spamcop.net/bl.shtml">spamcop blacklist-checks</a> on two similarily equipped servers, one with Sendmail and one Postfix.

If Spamcop went down, sendmail's SMTP service would go down immediately. Sometimes the whole server had to be rebooted.

Postfix, well, see for yourself:

orangejulius@postf:~ > uptime
12:59pm up 79 days, 20:29, 8 users, load average: 0.01, 0.02, 0.00

[Dilitante1]

look here:

http://www.ultrafunk.com/products/popcorn/

might be an option

[breezer]

Paddy have a look at myrealbox.com this is a webmail account but it can pull mail from upto 3 other mail servers.

I will be using the mail server part of this at work (from August) to allow users to access their home account and work account from the same interface.

Breezer

[rugger]

Originally posted by orangejulius
I'd recommend <a href="http://www.postfix.org/">Postfix</a>. Beats sendmail in every category -- performance, anti-spam features, reliability.

For instance, I enabled <a href="http://spamcop.net/bl.shtml">spamcop blacklist-checks</a> on two similarily equipped servers, one with Sendmail and one Postfix.

If Spamcop went down, sendmail's SMTP service would go down immediately. Sometimes the whole server had to be rebooted.

Postfix, well, see for yourself:

orangejulius@postf:~ > uptime
12:59pm up 79 days, 20:29, 8 users, load average: 0.01, 0.02, 0.00

I have to recommend postfix too.

It is very configurable, but also very simple to setup.

It is a big system compared to sendmail, but is scalable, reliable, secure, and virtually maintance free. It goes out of its way to prevent your system from overloading, allowing it to process far more messages under load then simpler designs.

We run postfix on our work server with about 500 users, with virus checking and it is very stable, very fast, and doesn't interfere at all with everything else our poor server does.

The only gotha in postfix is that if you mess up the configuration, the postfix system may load itself up in a half-working state, with the only indication of this being in the system logs. So be careful after changing the configuration.