I have been ask to setup a basic mail server for our test lab and want recommendations on how to do so. Any how to's would be greatly appreciated.

Postfix seems to be about the most common. It is well supported and feature rich. It can be a little difficult to setup, but it seems that almost everybody is successful after a period of debugging. The how-to on flurdy.com seems to be the most popular, but I also like the one by Johnny Chadda. Just search for postfix and those names and you should find the latest editions.

Aside from Postfix, I have seen a lot of recommendations for Citadel and Zimbra especially with respect to ease of installation and configuration, but I haven't used them. I personally use Postfix. The recent word is to stay away from QMail, which used to be a big name in mail servers but has gone unsupported for a long time and is compartively difficult to configure.

Just to add to the existing reply:

I recommend Postfix and Dovecot.

Postfix - in a simple configuration, will have very little actual configuration settings (hostname, point to mail relay, etc) in the
/etc/postfix/main.cf

There is a little more for Dovecot (ie. it should be configured to use only pop3s and imaps), but even that isn't all that hard.

Here is a link to the basic Postfix setup. Postfix manages the sending of mail.

http://www.postfix.org/BASIC_CONFIGURATION_README.html

Here is a link to the Dovecot documentation. Dovecot provides IMAP and POP3 services. It allows users to read their mail and transfer it to their computers.

http://www.dovecot.org/

One other thing to consider is that if you want SASL authentication, Postfix will support this via Dovecot and Cyrus. From reading the how-to documentation, Dovecot appears much easier to configure.

I would also recommend that you look at using a SQL back end for your users rather than tying them to Linux accounts. This way you can handle multiple, virtual, domains for any number of users that don't have to have Linux shells. There is a PHP based tool called Postfixadmin that greatly simplies the process and will even set up the maildir structure for you.

many thanks for all your reply