I'm planning on registering a domain name and hosting a mail server for my family (both in house and across the country), and was wondering what is a good program to use for POP3 access? And I was also wondering if there is a program that will scan incoming messages for viruses, and also if there is a spam filter.

Thanks for any help

I don't have any hands-on experience with this, but I've heard about qpopper ( www.eudora.com/qpopper/ ) being a good package. As for spamfiltering, I think that there are spamfilters around for Sendmail. For the virus part, Computer Associates have a Linux mailserver virusscanner, this is a commercial product, I don't know about an Open Source solution for that.

I'd suggest to setup IMAP4 instead of POP3 (courier-imap is a nice option, and has also pop3 in case you still need it). For SMTP check postfix - easy to configure, high performance & security. There are packages at www.linuxpackages.net for both of them btw.
For SPAM filtering I'd suggest SpamAssassin (http://au.spamassassin.org/index.html).
For howto's check :
http://www.hu.linuxfromscratch.org/h...l_procmail.txt
http://www.hu.linuxfromscratch.org/h...ssin+razor.txt
http://www.hu.linuxfromscratch.org/h...files/mail.txt

i use a postfix / qpopper setup here and they both work great.

There is another great reason to use courier-imap: Maildir support qmail is also another option, however I think it's quite overkill for a home/small office setup.

The POP family of protocols are fundamentally flawed, but they are popular with ISPs because the mail gets downloaded to the client - thus freeing ISP diskspace and pushing responsibility for Email storage and/or backup on to the client machine.

IMAPS is the best way to go - server-based Email, so it is backed up when you backup the server, and you can get your mail anywhere without necessarily downloading it to the client machine (which you may not own - for example you can get your mail from web kiosks or Internet cafes) which increases speed and security.

Don't use POP, use IMAP. Preferably with an encrypted pipe (IMAPS or ssh port-forwarding). Eudora and Pegasus (which are both free software for windows) will support IMAPS, and you can use this as an excuse to get your clients to dump Outlook before SoBig.G crushes them.

Red Hat can do this out of the box. I'd be very suprised if Slackware can't; Patrick is a very clever fellow.

MailScanner (www.MailScanner.info) will allow you to do virus checking and spam filtering in an easily configurable fashion without massive alterations to your existing system.

I've been doing this for my friends and family for years now; using Red Hat 6.2 originally but I'm up to 7.3 now.

Good luck!

For virus scanning use clamav

http://clamav.sf.net

Thanks for the info/suggestions everyone. I hadn't even thought about IMAP, but that probably would be a better idea. I'll do some research to decide which ones I want to use, but again, thanks for the info.

thanks for the info it helped me too

Qmail is beyond overkill. Unless your sending out millions of spam emails. Postfix would be a great choice. I run my mail server with it using IMAP and IMAPS. It allows me to run a script that backs up the mail dir of my server 2 times a day onto a seperate HDD.

however i cant find a good noob manual for postfix anywhere

http://tldp.org/cgi-bin/ldpsrch.cgi

http://www.tldp.org is your friend!

got a new friend

just search 'postfix' and you'll find a wealth of information.

seems to be working,

postfix 7485 0.0 0.3 2308 872 ? S 17:32 0:00 qmgr -l -t fifo -u
postfix 7486 0.0 0.3 2280 848 ? S 17:32 0:00 pickup -l -t fifo -u

now, how do i use postfix?