Hi all

After coming close to hanging myself after some Sendmail woes, can someone recommend a good, lightweight, and above all *easy to configure* SMTP server? I'm looking for something thats straight-forward, that someone who isn't a guru can quickly get set up and easily search the docs for simple answers when it falls over.

I've tried postfix, courier, and qmail in the past. I'm not a linux guru at all, but can compile and setup most web-server stuff.

Please help!

Postfix is certainly a lot easier than sendmail and it's compliant to it too. But I see you've already tried that one.

Well, my first question would be what you want to do with this "SMTP server" (I suppose you are referring to an MTA).

Most Linux boxes come standard with sendmail. This can be used to create and send out mails, but sendmail is actually an MTA (Mail Transport Agent), not an MUA (Mail User Agent - like KMail, Evolution to a certain degree, or any mail reader/composer application). Because it actually is an MTA, it supports many features (like filtering) that can be a drag to configure. Lightweight replacements are an alternative.

But you can also consider using a real MUA or a small program like /bin/mail, or nail to send out mails.
You don't really need to have your own "mail server" (ie an MTA) running to send out mails. All you need is a program that contacts the mail servers for other people.
Unless, of course, you're hosting your own (large) network, in which case a central mail server is handy for centralized mail storage (and backup).
Unfortunatly, some programs may need to be reconfigured or may not work properly if there is no mail transport agent running (ie sendmail).

Sorry to annoy you with these semantics. I justed wanted to point out that you may not need to run sendmail or alike. It depends on what you want to accomplish exactly. Just sending out mails (even with aliasing, mailing lists, etc) is different from hosting a mail server. Using sendmail (or alike) is a combination of both.

Sorry, I should've been more specific.

Basically, I'm looking for a simple to configure, lightweight MTA to use on our mailservers. I've had trouble with our mailboxes recently, and because I don't know anything about mail hosting I don't know where to start. I started to look at courier-mta, but after working with it for a day and still not being able to set up a mailbox for a client I gave up.

I'm happy setting up a web-server (Apache/Lighttpd), with PHP/Python/Ruby/Perl/etc. The documentation's great if I get any problems. Mail, on the other hand, seems to be a whole new level of geekery!

If the docs for courier were as good as for the web servers, I wouldn't be asking the question. Which is:

Is there a MTA you can recommend which has good, easy-to-understand documentation, which is quick and simple to configure, and has a good community behind it to support it?

Also, if webmail is thrown in that would be even better!

Postfix seems to be popular now. I've installed Qmail with Vpopmail and it was relatively painless. Additionally, if you want web-based e-mail access you will probably need an IMAP server, so you might up with a mixture of mail server apps running to handle IMAP, POP3, and SMTP.

If you're looking for the "easy" way out, you might consider hiring a contractor to get everything setup for you. Just a thought...

Peace...

What's wrong with postfix? You could install something like squirrel mail to get webmail, or you could even write a simple PHP script to do it.

i really got hooked on Exim from back when i tried debian
sooooooo easy to use and configurable

Maybe a better question would be:

Can someone point me in the direction of a good "newbie" setup/config guide for {insert MTA here}?

I haven't installed Postfix so I don't know of any "HOWTO" like documents out there but here are some "toasters" I found for Qmail:

http://www.shupp.org/toaster/
http://sylvestre.ledru.info/howto/ho...l_vpopmail.php
http://qmailrocks.org/
http://www.differentpla.net/node/165

Cruise through those and see what you think.

Peace...

well you say in your profile you have debian
debian provides scripts to configure all its software including MTA
those configure file generated on debian can be used to configure the same server on other distributions as well.

I can vouch for Postfix. We have six SMTP gateways running Postfix that each process about 250k messages per day. We have never had an issue with them (that was related to Postfix) since putting these boxes into production about a year and a half ago. Highly recommended.

foo_bar_foo: Thanks. We're using debian on our test/dev server. All our live servers are FC2.

I'll see if I can give Postfix a go. Might try Courier again, I've got a soft-spot for it.

Cheers all!