I'm setting up a portal-type website (phpnuke) for a city, and I would like to offer a basic free email service.

Which would be the simplest to deal with; Postfix or sendmail ?
I run Mandrake 9

I read everywhere that sendmail is very complicated.
Since I'm no expert and kinda struggling through all this, I would prefer to stick with the KISS principle, but I'll do whatever it takes if need be...

qmail is bug free. In my opinion it is essential in case of free email service.

Postfix is fast secure and very easy to configure.

I've never found sendmail to be all that difficult. It's very secure and stable out of the box, and is industry standard.

There you go, three differing opinions.

Sendmail is the most difficult, but the most configurable, by far. It is probably your best option, but study up!

Chris

( I knew I could count on you guys for answers. This forum HAS to be the BEST!)

Quite frankly, I think all of you are right.

For me it's going to be which system will be the easiest all around.
Setting up a mail server is totally unknown territory.

I'm getting into that data overload stage ( Linux, then Apache, then PHP, then MySQL, then phpMyAdmin, then nuke, then bind, then...)
Whao! Burnout! I think my brain has gone and hid under my liver.

So now I need as simple a solution as possible.
I have just spent the last few days reading about (mostly) sendmail and Postfix.
Postfix got installed automatically when I installed Mandrake. So that's one thing done. But...

I'm not sure which one will be the better one for my situation.
I want to offer very basic free email accounts. Nothing fancy.
Receive mail, reply, compose and send it. And that's about it.

Can Postfix do that?
If not, then which one?

And what the hell is Procmail? Is that something i have to know about?

No, postfix can't do that, as that is not what it's meant to do... postfix and sendmail are MTA's, Mail Transfer Agents, they route email through networks and put it in mailboxes at the end of it's travels around the world. your specifications are nothign more than a webmail interface, such as neomail. you will still need an MTA in the background of course, to actually DO stuff with the mail that they click about and write.

sendmail is ok, a bit cryptic though at times. postfix is fine and dandy, and easier to configure and maintain. Personally i'd recommend a go with http://exim.org it's quite lightweight and absurdly easy to get going.

procmail is used by a number of MTA's to sort mail. e.g. if title contains the word "monkey" put in this folder, if it's from spam.com then throw it away etc... sendmail uses it a lot, exim actually can do that part it self even easier than procmail can, so if you used exim you wouldn't need then. then again though if your MTA is going to always be stuck behing a single web client, then you'd probably want to sort mail within the client...

Excellent!
I'll go and check out exim.

Thanks.

( I'll let you know what happens )

For webmail, nothing beats squirrelmail http://www.squirrelmail.org/

It works with your existing SMTP server (exim or sendmail) and IMAP server. You can even have LDAP-based address books and utilize a MySQL server to store user's preferences. This might seem a little overcomplicated, but if you are going to offer webmail, squirrelmail is a good place to start, and you can add these features later.

Ok, I'm back with a question.

I've been looking at, and reading up on both SquirrelMail and Exim.

What I'm not sure of at this point is whether either one is an actual replacement for Postfix/sendmail/qmail/etc...

Do I still need, say Postfix, to run in the background?

Am I looking at something like "layers" here?

Postfix at the bottom, then Exim or SquirrellMail in the middle, then the html/php (?) layer where people access their accounts from?

It looks like SquirrellMail has an html interface, but I haven't figgured out yet if it for the admin or subscribers.

Exim has Exim-mon which seems to be for admin.

Do you guys actually run these mail servers ?

( ok, so there's more than one question )

I use exim, and it works great, Very easy to get going. As I understand it , exim, sendmail, postfix, and qmail are all MTA's, so you will only need one of them....

And yes, I do run a MTA (exim)

i hear that postfix is more secure than sendmail

Squirrelmail is strictly a html interface for your web users (subscibers) to access their email, without having to configure a Email client. This is similar to hotmail.

I actually run sendmail, uw-imap, squirrelmail, apache /w php, MySQL, and OpenLDAP.

Here's a layered approach for a squrrelmail config:

Your web clients, with a web browser
|
Apache-php
|
Squrrelmail---------Squirrelmail---------Squrrelmail--------- Squirrelmail
|----------------------|----------------|-------------------|
Sendmail___________IMAP___________LDAP___________MySQL
(Outgoing email) (Incoming email) (Address Books) (User Settings)

That's it! That really cleared it up.

It looks like a request is made to Apache, which serves up Squirrelmail, and SquirrellMail is the middle man between the client and the prog that does the work in the background (sendmail/postfix, IMAP, etc...)
Well, close enough anyways.

Am I looking at a lot of command-line stuff here, or are there some GUIs for all these to come to my rescue?

Any install advice? Like install this one before that one, etc...
I have Postfix installed and running, It should be ok, shouldn't it?
Also have MySQL going.

I'll be installing from RPMs.
I have:
libldap2 - (installed)
openldap - (not installed)
openldap-servers - (not installed)
and then there are these which have no explanation as to what they are:
openldap-back_dnssrv - (not installed)
openldap-back_ldap - (not installed)
openldap-back_passwd - (not installed)
openldap-back_sql - (not installed)
openldap-clients - (not installed)

------------------------

php-imap - (installed)
imap - (not installed)

I expect some of them are not needed.
Are there some missing that I should have?

Note that Apache, MySQL, OpenLDAP, Sendmail, and imap are all completely independant of each other. One exception, however, is that php will need to be installed in addition to php-ldap, php-mysql, php-imap. This is that actual interface that squirrelmail uses to talk to these other services.

You'll want to add imap, openldap, openldap-clients and openldap-servers. I don't have any idea about the 'back' ldap packages... they're probably unnessasary.

Unforunately, I don't know of any GUI tools to do this stuff. However, the configuration you are looking for has many steps, but each one is fairly simple and something that someone has done before. You're not reinventing the wheel...

A basic start can be found here: http://www.netikus.net/documents/Lin...stallation.pdf

Doesn't really cover ldap in depth, and doesn't cover squirrelmail or mysql at all. Does help with a simple (despite what you've heard) sendmail configuration & imap install.

I hope all this helps.