Does anyone have any hints on which e-mail server software to choose?

It needs to both receive mail (SMTP?) and support e-mail clients (IMAP, POP3, other?). A pointer to a review/faq/howto that you have found useful in this regard would be helpful too.

Ideally, I would like to use Open Source / Free (as in beer) software for this.

To give you an idea of what sort of compute power I have available for this project: I am running Fedora core 3 on a Pentium III with 128MB RAM which is already running a low-traffic Apache server, but nothing else. It usually operates in runmode 3 (console and terminals only) but I can start up Gnome or KDE if necessary. The expected e-mail load is about to 100 incoming and 30 outgoing e-mails per day.

I used http://www.qmailrocks.org/ as a guide to set up a qmail mail server with POP/IMAP access on my Fedora Core 2 box. It shouldn't be to much different for FC3. The guide helps a lot, I know I wouldn't have been able to set it up without it. It describes setting up spam filtering, virus scanning, and webmail if you want that as well. Good luck!

I have the kids set up with softhome.net, and some GMail addys as well.
SMTP and POP3 are covered by both of those.

SMTP and POP/IMAP are dealt with by separate services, so you mix and match what seems best.

Fedora Core 3 ships with several choices: Exim, Postfix and Sendmail for SMTP, and dovecot and cyrus which handle IMAP and POP.

Sendmail is awkward and not worth the time any more, Exim is flexible and powerful but expects you to understand SMTP to the level of a professional mail server administrator. Postfix is the simplest, and integrates with popular extras like SquirrelMail Webmail (also included with Fedora Core).

Cyrus is for larger installations, so I would use dovecot for POP/IMAP.

A lot of people like qmail, but for a small-scale service you may find it easier to go with the flow and use one of the products packaged for your distribution rather than install and update a extra system manually.

Mail is just text, so a low-powered server is fine. The load that you are talking about is actually trivial to Linux on a P3.

You might want to look at installing Webmin to give you a nice set of controls for sendmail or Postfix (and the rest of the system). Webmin is very light compared to X-Windows graphical stuff, and can be a big time time saver.

Hope that helps

I like BincIMAP for IMAP, because each user's mail is in their home directory's Maildir folder, in Maildir format, of course.
Combine that with postfix delivering in ~/Maildir/ in Maildir format, and you've got everything.

Yves.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I will read up on each and try some of them out.

Cheers, Mark.