Hello All

I just had a question regarding mail servers.

I require a mail server which can work with multiple domains, and do POP3 Webmail, Spam Filtering, SMTP, etc.

Just wondering if anyone can point me in the right direction.

Thanks for any help in advance

Qmail has worked really well for me. You can get more information here.

Postfix is better. Secure and stable, based from Sendmail but with a better track record and a thousand times easier to configure, easier to maintain without having to patch your MTA with a dozen or more packages to get the same functionality like Qmail..

Also maintained on a more consistent basis, Qmail latest release was from April 19th of this year.. yikes.. I also had to administer qmail in a corporate environment, what a nightmare to keep patched and up to date.. ughh

As you can see, I'm not a qmail fan.. postfix is the way to go. I'd rather run sendmail even..

Oh and another reason I feel like sharing, the Qmail developer and supporting cast are in most cases, difficult people who are of no help. When you need to patch qmail, most of the time you're doing it with 3rd party patches cause the developer is stuck on some ego trip cloud he still hasn't come down from. I guess that's what you get when a snobby professor writes some C code to create an MTA.

Ok I'm done, just needed to vent after seeing qmail as it brings back the nightmares from when I had to deal with it on a daily basis.

I found postfix much easier to configure and follow than qmail. Plus postfixadmin just rules for administration, especially for virtual domains. I was using qmail before... upgraded it and I couldn't get it working again, even following the guides from scratch.

This is the howto I'm using for building a postfix mail server that incorporates amavisd-new, spamassassin, clamav and mysql for handling virtual domains.

http://www.postfixvirtual.net/postfixconf.html

Combining just the three - amavisd-new, spamassasin and clamav, you will have a pretty good unwanted mails protection but in the price of having your quarantine filled with junked messages and your CPU might be heavily loaded scanning mails.

To address the above, I added Postgrey - a greylisting implementation for postfix by working on RCPT or before the queue. It can help to block during RCPT not less than 80% of unwanted mails that are usually sent through botnets (zomby computers) and unloading greatly the burdens of your mail scanners.

To further boost this protection before the queue, I recently added S25R (Selective SMTP Rejection) and a patch for postgrey for tarpitting and making its greylisting and autowhitelisting even harder to penatrate. This is important because spammers are getting now aware of every techniques deployed against them and some already knew how to counter postgrey and thus, postgrey alone may not be enough.

It is already impractical to allow mails that we already knew are spam and then scan and bring to quarantine.

Postgrey:

http://isg.ee.ethz.ch/tools/postgrey/

Postgrey tarpitting and sleep patch for postfix:

http://k2net.hakuba.jp/pub/targrey-0...rey-1.27.patch
http://k2net.hakuba.jp/spam/postfix.conf.2.tar.gz
http://k2net.hakuba.jp/pub/postfix-sleep.patch

S25R:

http://gabacho.reto.jp/en/anti-spam/...am-system.html

It is also worth adding DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) to our arsenal.

http://mipassoc.org/dkim
http://www.ijs.si/software/amavisd/a...docs.html#dkim
http://www.elandsys.com/resources/sendmail/dkim.html

These I hope are enough reasons for you to consider POSTFIX.

--------
GANI

your perfect guid

http://www.bowe.id.au/michael/isp/webmail-server.htm

with a help of
http://www.lifewithqmail.org/lwq.html

you are not in a need for any docs else

I help maintain a (guess you'd call it flavor) of QMail, called QMail-Toaster (www.qmailtoaster.com). We've got most of the patches you need as well as spam scanning/virus scanning/webmail already rolled into SRC RPMS. Download the files, run the install script and in 30 minutes or so you have a functioning QMail server with some bells and whistles. Virtual domains and all.
I've been a fan of QMail for a while now for one simple reason: they offered a reward for anyone that could find a security hole (in QMail and it's daemons, not other packages like Squirrelmail) that went unclaimed. That's why you don't see any updates of the software. It was written well, if not robust. The author (Dr. Bernstein) is a twit, I agree, as are almost all the major posters on the official qmail-mailing list (pretty much only responses you get are RTFM and to tell you how dumb you are for not searching Google/archives). He released QMail under a license that will not allow anyone else to release binary versions of his software, which is why we release source RPMs with spec files that put a bunch of patches in for you. We also have our own mailing list for our packages where RTFM is not in the vocabulary.
Basically, you need to make your own decision. What will be best for you, what is your learning curve. When I needed to implement a mail server (and had NO Linux experince up to that point), the only mail server package at the time that would work for somone with 35 minutes of previous Linux experince was QMail-Toaster. I'm sure there are plenty of sendmail/postfix "toasters" and how-tos out there now, so look over them all and see which one does what you want. Then stick with it.

Postfix + Dovecot with SASL authentication worked fine for me. Note that postfix by default does not allow you to send external mail. you will need to configure with sasl to authenticate and relay mail. You can find more info here

I'm not quite experienced with servers. However., Exim+Cyrus did the job for me.