Re: Seeking Mail Server Suggestions

[Michael DeMan <michael_(_at_)_staff_(_dot_)_openaccess_(_dot_)_org>]

Hi,

We run qpopper, uw-imap and squirrelmail (to provide a web-ui).

Technically speaking, this is supposedly not the ideal setup but it 
works great for a couple thousand e-mail accounts.  I have heard that 
Courier Cyrus is far better.

One nice thing, qpopper has a 'uw-imap hack' option.  UW-imap puts a 
special mail entry at the beginning of the MBOX that has something do 
with managing its mail and with this option, qpopper is smart enough to 
ignore it.

We also use postfix for SMTP.  We converted from sendmail about a year 
and a half ago and I would highly recommend it.  The configuration 
files, once you get familiar with them, are far easier to handle than 
sendmail.

If you want spam filtering, there is a nice open source project that if 
you know a little HTML you can make the web-ui look prettier.  Its very 
complicated to setup but again seems to make our residential customers 
happy - www.renaissoft.com/maia/.  I would highly recommend simply 
getting SpamAssassin working first, then worrying about configuring 
Maia if you want.

For your user home folders, have your add-user script create a 
subdirectory www and mail in each home folder.  Modify apache to go to 
~/www for user accounts and your FTP server.  Have uw-imap/squirrelmail 
utilize ~/mail.  That way your customer mails for IMAP are stored in 
their home directories but they never see it.

Again, I'm not saying this is the best setup, but it has worked well 
for us over the years.

As far as account management goes, we have custom software on the back 
end that we have built up over the years that provides tight 
integration with our automated billing systems.  For starting from 
scratch, you might be able to find something on the internet, or just 
start crafting your own shell/perl scripts, and once you have them fine 
tuned, slap a web-ui on the front of them.  You may want to consider 
writing these scripts in PHP instead since then you can probably bolt 
the web-ui in front of it more quickly.


Michael F. DeMan
Director of Technology
OpenAccess Network Services
Bellingham, WA 98225
michael_(_at_)_staff_(_dot_)_openaccess_(_dot_)_org
360-647-0785
On Jul 18, 2005, at 2:53 AM, Tannis McLaine wrote:

> I'm not new to FreeBSD or Apache, but I am new to the
> world of email serving. Some of my friends and
> classmates have a server for hosting our project
> websites on several domains, but we don't currently
> host our own email. (Sendmail scared us!!) We have
> been doing some research into the topic and have found
> lots of information on specific areas, but no good
> general discussion. Because of this, I ask you for
> your experienced advice. What do you recommend we look
> into for running our own complete mail system? Our
> current setup is explained below, as are our goals for
> email. We don't see instructions, just some advice and
> pointers, such as which daemons/packages to user and
> which to avoid.
>
> Currently:
> * FreeBSD 5.4 on 933 MHz Pentium3, 768 MB RAM
> * Apache
> * ~12 user accounts, ~6 groups
> * Perl scripts to handle adding/deleting users and
> maintaining web space for projects and for users.
> * No databases, just perl scripts and flat files.
>
> Email Goals:
> * Incoming (via Postfix?)
> * Outgoing (via Postfix and POP-before-SMTP or other
> authentication?)
> * IMAP and POP3 (Courier?)
> * Webmail (OpenWebMail or maybe SquirrelMail)
> * Spam filtering (via SpamAssassin?)
>
> One other additional goal is to maybe implement some
> sort of user database to help maintain the server (or
> a cluster of servers) as our needs grow. Maybe
> something with OpenLDAP or MySQL. It might be handy to
> have various flags/settings for each user account, to
> enable or disable "features" like "SSH Shell Access"
> or to adjust quotas for each user from a central
> location. We don't want or need anything overly
> complex or pre-fab, but it would be nice to automate
> and organize some of this information and these tasks.
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com
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