Hi ...

we are a company that currently running two MS Exchange mail servers located at two different location (site A and Site B) that are serving one email domain. i.e. xyz.com

and because we believe in Linux, we decided recently to study to build the same mail system under linux .

i wonder if somebody can help with some docs or tips for the proposed mail configuration ?


thanks a lot in advance for help

Ashraf

I have noticed that E-Smith has only two comments on this whole forum, which I found rather sad.

E-Smith is 360MB or so.

Easy to install.....all text based, but nothing but nice easy prompts.

You do your whole configuration through a web browser.

After a defaul install, and with your Domain pointing to the right IP adress, you could have your new server up and running within hours.

It has all mail servers built in and enabled, Web hosting and easy FTP access, You can make it a PDC or just another server on the network.

It has it's own built in Webmail. Firewall, User Authentication is easy as to install.

If I were setting up a Webmail, WebServer, and everything to do with nice Internet Servers. E-smith would be my recommendation.

Try it.
It's very good, very easy to upgrade as well. Pop in the CD with the newer build, and select upgrade. It does it very easily and nice, and doesn't stuff up your configuration at all.

well,

where i can find E-Smith .. ?

id like to get this as well...

http://www.e-smith.org/

How's that?
Also at freshmeat and a few others according to google/linux

If you need to scale to huge levels (which I doubt, since a couple of Exchange boxes were working) you need sendmail, and you should buy the GUI and a support contract from sendmail.com (because sendmail is difficult to understand and configure otherwise).

If you don't intend to dominate the world with your Email servers, I recommend Postfix instead. It's a lot easier and the basic design is more secure than Sendmail's old-fashioned monolithic privileged daemon approach.

I wouldn't bother with qmail, personally. There are licensing and support issues with qmail (among them, the fact that the author runs a "one-man show" and may get hit by a truck one of these days).

MailScanner can be used to integrate virus scanning, spam checking, and real-time black hole lists with any sendmail-compatible transport. I highly recommend MailScanner, and use it on all my mailservers. At home it uses the free f-prot virus scanner and spamassassin, at work it uses two commercial scanners, spamassassin, and both locally maintained and remote RBLs.

We did not receive a SINGLE sobig.F virus during the recent fooferaw - I did NO special preparation to the systems but they rejected several thousand sobigs without any problems. I see this as a testimony to the robust design of MailScanner.

If you want web integration you should check out IMP and the HORDE at horde.org.

If you want maildirs and/or IMAP folders-in-folders, you should check out http://www.courier-mta.org.

My users generally use Pegasus or Eudora on the desktop, and the stock Red Hat IMAP daemon.

Remember, an Email solution AT MINIMUM includes a Mail User Agent (such as Pegasus, Eudora, Imp, the Bat!, or even the dreaded virus-festival Outlook) a Mail Transfer Agent (such as sendmail, exim, qmail, or postfix) and a Mail Delivery Agent (such as the UW IMAPd, procmail, Cyrus, Qpopper, etc.) as well as optional additional components such as virus scanners, mime defangers, decompressors, secure transport layers, spam filtering, blackhole lists, and so on.

Get the company to fund you to do a home network system first, as a pilot. They should pay for your DSL line and give you some of their older lamer computers and a hub with a few lengths of Cat 5. You should pay for any extras, like a fast new computer for your own workstation and any fancy wiring to get workstations into bedrooms or kitchens etc.