I work at a school and need to setup an e-mail server for the students. Is Linux the right choice for this, and if so, how should I go about doing it?

Linux might certainly be the cheapest/most configurable choice, but that all depends on your needs.

A quick mail server can be set up with sendmail and a POP or IMAP server, depending on your preference. Qualcomm makes a decent free server named "qpopper", which you might want to try out.

Be sure to read up on email security, especially things like "relaying" to avoid having your setup abused by spammers (if it faces the 'Net).

I know this post is quite light on info, but it all depends on your desired setup. Will the students read email through a terminal connection to the server (like elm/mutt/pine via ssh), or will they use desktop utilities like Eudora/Netscape/Outlook/etc? Is price an issue? How about "enterprise" support?

Maybe a little more background would help myself and others steer you in the right direction.

I think the cost and reliebilty far out weigh anything from microsoft.

To set up an e-mail server, the first thing to do should be to purchase the O'Reilly Sendmail book and spend a weekend studying / playing . Any of the Linux distros will work perfect, or any of the BSD's for that matter. Whichever your more comfortable with.

That may be true, however the mac has two seriously great email server software packages for it. Both of which have a 'free' version with limited features.

And everyone knows security on the mac is really really good (far beyond anything micro$oft can do).

I agree macs have some great stuff now days, I think with linux and mac you could forget about micosoft.

with the latest versions of RedHat sendmail is actually a pretty easy setup/install. Especially when using something like webmin to do it with

just my 2 cents