Linux Mail Server how to/guide
 

Linux Gurus,

I would like to seek advice about setting up Linux Mail Server.

Here are some of my questions:

1. What are the softwares needed?
- there are some sites that says sendmail is lacking security and suggests
postfix or qmail.
2. What CPU specifications do I have to consider?
3. Where should I start to study?

pls. be patient to a newbie thanx...

-AKO-

1. Sendmail is probably still the most widely used MTA but in my humble opinion it's awkward to configure and maintain. I prefer exim while others swear by postfix or qmail. There are several other options but for the sake of finding information and getting community support these four are probably the best choices.

You should also take anti-spam tools (SpamAssassin, MailScanner?) and antivirus into consideration. Even if you and your clients don't use Windows you shouldn't be forwarding or even accepting infected email.

2. For a small office network an old 200MHz Pentium with 64MB RAM will be more than enough. Sending and receiving email isn't very CPU intensive, (I assume you're not using any graphical applications at all) but spam and virus detection can be. Basically it depends on the volume of mail traffic and what scanning you do, but like I said - sending and receiving mail in itself isn't tough on the hardware.

3. Perhaps here. The Linux documentation project has lots of good information. When you're starting to know in which direction to go or if you want to know more about certain types of setup, Google is your friend (as always). Oh, and don't forget Google Groups for searching the Usenet archives. It comes in very handy, especially with this kind of things.


Håkan

hw-tph,

Thanx for your information... I really appreciated it... Linux land is really a nice place for adventure... not hard yet not simple...

thanx again...

-AKO-

yea i like Exim too.
there are lots of choices
this is what i use
cause i like it easy:
Exim
Procmail
fetchmail
(for getting mail from other acounts)
Avmailgate
(antivirus - free for home Linux users)
Anomy Mail Sanitzer
(kills nasty html and js)
(Anomy uses f-prot virus scanner)
(2 virus scanners -- extreem paranoia)
Spam assassin
qpopper
wemail
(for http access)

personally I'm rather fond of postfix. It's relatively easy to configure, especially if you read the documentation. It's also quite newbie friendly, you really have to make an effort to set it up as an open relay for example.
It also allows for some filtering by dnsbl or by header and body checks.

I run mine on a P200pro with 128mb for 3 users. That machine also runs apache and samba and some other small things. Only thing that machine is slow at is running a php webmail application. Here's my postfix stats for this week:

number of messages blocked by which dnsbl
number of messages blocked by bl.spamcop.net 48
number of messages blocked by relays.ordb.org 0
number of messages blocked by sbl.spamhaus.org 2
number of messages blocked by dnsbl.sorbs.net 257
number of messages blocked by cn.countries.nerd.dk 1
number of messages blocked by tw.countries.nerd.dk 5
number of messages blocked by br.countries.nerd.dk 0
number of messages blocked by kr.countries.nerd.dk 3
number of messages blocked by jp.countries.nerd.dk 7

total number of messages blocked by all dnsbls : 323
number of virusses blocked : 765
number of relay attempts (not included in any totals) : 0

total number of blocked messages : 1088
number of messages actually delivered to inboxes : 114 which is 10.48 percent

System itself is not exactly experiencing load but it is a bit low on memory.


System status 4:08pm up 73 days, 14:54, 0 users, load average: 0.05, 0.20, 0.23

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Memory Usage 94% memory used, 8476 K free
(shared: 0, buffers: 21124, cached: 53380).
Swap Usage 6% used, 135156 K free.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2 1.0G 929M 52M 95% /
/dev/hda1 30M 5.9M 23M 21% /boot
none 70M 0 69M 0% /dev/shm

hi,
I have already posted about my doubts in another thread.
I am going to impliment 3000 concurrent user mailserver in postfix.
what shouls be the hardware specification and banwidth etc?
thank you
bye