Hi,

I am a totaly new to Linux, and operating systems in general for that matter. I know enough to research and learn about things though. I have just been given the task of researching and possibly implementing a linux based email system in house. We have 30-40 employees who use our email, and we are currently hosted by iswest. So that being said I am open to any suggestions on books, software, hardware, etc... as it relates to my current task at hand. I appreciate your help in advance.

P.S I have already read the Wikipedia page on the history of the Linux kernel, that was interesting and informative

Maybe this will help you some.

http://www.postfix.org/documentation.html (see basic configuration section) form
http://www.postfix.org

This really helped me setup a secure in-house e-mail system for our small company and I was starting from scratch like you with no real prior knowledge.

http://www.howtoforge.com/virtual_po..._quota_courier

There is also the same tutorial for different distros if you're not using a Debian-based system. Theres definitely a Fedora/RedHat version of the tutorial if you hunt about a bit on the site. It's short on explanations, being more a copy and paste kinda tutorial, but it'll give you a solid start and then you can work out the details later.

Hope this helps - helped me anyway.

A.

http://wiki.contribs.org/SME_Server:About

If your new to linux this is a easy solution, everything is configure via a web page once installed.

Steve

In case you'd like to add calendaring, tasks, etc., try Zimbra:
http://wiki.zimbra.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

When I first started looking into setting up an email server, I went for Courier-MTA. It is naturally oriented to RedHat, which I was using at the time. The configuration seemed to be a lot easier than existing systems and the install/setup instructions were very clear. Nevertheless there is a lot to email services and it took some time to be able to work out the purpose of many settings (if you are familiar with email servers then it should be quite easy). There are a number of filters available, such as pyfilter which allows a range of anti-malware strategies such as greylisting and ClamAV Antivirus scanning. It includes IMAP and POP servers. I was even able to setup LDAP authentication, although there are simpler ways.

Ken

I like Linux and we use it for all of our 15+ servers and most of our desktop systems, however, I would like to suggest a possible alternative email system for you unless you have a full time system administrator.

Google has a service called Google Apps (www.google.com/apps) which includes email services for individuals, companies and organizations. There is a free service for up to 100 accounts and also a very reasonably priced paid service. You can have your own domain email address and the service is all maintained on Google's servers 24/7. A very comprehensive spam filter is included, accounts storage is now over 7 gigabytes and you can access your email via pop or imap, web browser or mobile device. There are extensive sharing, grouping, filtering and other options available and email attachments can be up to 20MB.

Unless you have someone to administer a mail server and system it can be a time consuming job. I just wanted to suggest a very inexpensive and reliable alternative.

If you are determined to setup your own server I would go with
Debian - OS
potsfix - MTA --basic setup is relatively easy out of the box
dovecot - POP/IMAP access --debatable depending who you talk to
squirrelmail - webmail access
spamassin - Anti-Spam
ESET's NOD32 - excellent Anti-Virus

However as AuroraCA stated don't do it unless you will have a sysadmin that will monitor,tweak and maintain the server. Also plan for a dedicated server, minimum 1G of RAM.

In short do your research and weigh all your options. Know what you are getting yourself into first.

If you server will be local to you, you can use "Webmin" to help you configure the server.

Thank you all for the many responses and suggestions. I will start to looks at each of them an weigh our options. I dont believe that we have the email server yet so that will be based on what we decide to go with. As far as admin goes, that was to be my job as well. So thanks again for all of your suggestions. If we go with the linux setup, Im sure I will be spending some more time on here.

Bryan

OK,

So my boss says that he is looking at running Suse and novell GroupWise. Any feedback on that?

Sorry, can't help having a bit of a chuckle. Don't you just love a boss who delegates a research job to you, then when you're deep into the job, tells you what the answer has to be!

Suse runs Postfix by default IIRC

Hi Rudd4Prez, I have recently setup a SuSE 11 GroupWise 7.03 server.

It is important to note that one can setup in two basic ways.

The easiest way is to go with 32 bit Open Enterprise Server (OES) & SuSE together.

The other is to setup SuSE then configure openSLP, install/configure eDirectory, install ConsoleOne and finally install GroupWise (may be Samba and openLDAP if required for network authenication). You will need to setup Samba and maybe openLDAP for network services. Note do not use NFS file shares to remote access the server. Only use CIFS (Windows shares) or NCP (Novell client with NICI installed to provide shares) to perform remote administration or work directly on the server to prevent database corruption. Yes this method is much more work, but has a lighter load on the server.

Be sure to get the right version of SuSE, one that comes with OES is not exactly the same as the standalone version. If you use the standalone version then try to install OES, serious conflicts will arise preventing an easy installation.

Some blogs say go 64 bit for the apache/tomcat performance. I found ConsoleOne did not work quite right in the 64 bit version. GroupWise is only 32 bit at this time so it is not a great loss.

The OES is a one time license fee, while the SuSE and GroupWise with eDirectory is yearly subscription.

I found Novell documentation to decent. GWAVA has an excellent best pratices PDF. Some blogs also had good information on the options one can and should do.

I recommend some research how to best setup the directory (OES/SuSE with eDirectory or SuSE with eDirectory, openLDAP and Samba) for your situation. From the number of users a single server would handle the load in a simple single container directory tree. OU=Office.O=Company (eDirectory) or dc=office,dc=company (Samba/openLDAP) as an example.

The free way to backup is to use dbcopy and rsync to the backup location (restore location) then copy to a tape. Some commercial solutions exist as well but dbcopy/rsync does work well for most purposes.

GroupWise does provide a normal client, webaccess, SOAP, POP and IMAP access. The IMAP implementation is primitive but does function.

One thing that puzzled me was the GroupWise install uses LDAP format (coma separator) during the install for administrator context into the eDirectory tree instead of the eDirectory format (period separator). One could easily mistake a period for a coma and vise versa, just verify the syntax before proceeding.

Note: Be sure to tune postfix to listen to the localhost only to free up port 25 on the NIC.

I find GroupWise to be secure and very stable on SuSE. Of the commercial products I believe GroupWise had the fewest secure holes over the last couple of years. GroupWise was in the single digits, Notes with two digits and Exchange with 4 digits.

Hope this helps.

I know some free webmail operators who run
qmail and they find it robust.