Hi,

Ultimately, your requirements should drive your decision

Let me qualify this opinion by disclosing that I am by no means a guru. However, when I wanted to set up a mail server for my home domain, the installation, documentation and support had to be easy.

Although there may be technically superior solutions out there, I am kind of partial to Qmail in either of two flavors (in truth, it's not necessarily Qmail itself that sold me, but the individual implementations):

www.qmailrocks.org - this site gives you a step-by-step walk through for configuring a Qmail server with anti-virus, anti-spam, web administration, smtp/pop/imap; it also provides a squirrelmail interface for checking email via the web.

The documentation is very helpful and you learn a lot during the install. Given an existing install of CentOS, I would plan for about 8 hours for a first-time install.

www.qmailtoaster.com - when my first mail server died (due to catastrophic hardware failure), I took the opportunity to switch to qmailtoaster. I'm a bit busy with life away from a keyboard, and the qmail-toaster setup had a couple of very strong benefits for me:

First, it is incredibly simple. Given an existing CentOS installation, you can have a Qmail-toaster up and running in less than two hours (most of which is download/compile time). Second, there is a great web-admin interface for handling users, domains, and the MRTG add-on (speaking of domains, it supports multiple virtual domains).

Features include spamassassin, clamav (antivirus), ezmlm, squirrelmail, smtp/pop/imap and etc.

Finally, for me... the best part of the qmail-toaster installation is the mailing list, very friendly and helpful, with no haughty "RTFM" edicts from the self-appointed, unconfirmed bench. Consequently, there are very few in the way of stupid questions (perhaps when people give so willingly of their time and knowledge, there is the subconscious desire to search the archives rather than waste their time).

just my $0.02

Another alternative is the recently released Scalix mail server www.scalix.com. I have not tested it, but there is a free 'community version' which is a full-featured version of the enterprise install (though limited to 5-users).

hth,

Ron Jones Alpharetta, GA

After checking the link, I found that I need to compile most of the software that was use.. all I search for was something that was provided by CentOS `out-of-box` which will simplified the upgrade process by adding some repo and run `yum upgrade` without worrying that I could lost some step while compiling the source ( especially when there was a security fix and need to update urgently ).

Anyway, thanks for the links.. if what I was asking for is not provided by the CentOS 4.x by default then, I will brave myself to follow all those step. ( Anyway, CentOS was a server base distributions and I really wonder why it was not include all those setup which is common for someone who want to setup the email server these days )

Thanks In Advances, regards, ijez

Hi,

I agree. There is a working solution "right out of the box" with CentOS with either Postfix or Sendmail. I honestly don't understand why a couple of folks keep mentioning DJB's software tools when people ask about mail systems for CentOS. There is a reason those tools are not included with the distro. Ijez, if you want to email me offline, I'll try to help get you up and running.

Cheers,

I'm currently out of office for a couple of weeks.. thanks for your willing to give a hand. I'll try to contact you ones I back at works :)

Thanks In Advances,

Regards, ijez

On Thu, 2005-10-27 at 10:06 +0100, Karanbir Singh wrote:

ijez wrote:

...

Hi,

I need to setup a new mail server and before I got my feet wet or losing in the configurations jungle, I really need some advice from the gurus here for what the best software to used for the mailserver base on CentOS 4.x setup.

The objective is, the mailserver will be easy to setup, maintained and have some

1. database backend for storing user info ( mysql? )
2. spam and antivirus filtering
3. webbase user administrations
4. Provide smtp,smtps,pop3,pop3s,imap,imaps service

Any pointer to a good documentations, how-to or links base on CentOS 4.x setup is really appreciates.

Personally, for such a setup - I'd go with postfix-mysql + cyrusimapd, and for webadmin you can throw in web-cyradm. That will let you manage virtual users / domains / forwards / autoreplies etc

One of the most recommended setup's to combat spam, cheaply, seems to be implementing greylisting within postfix. In most cases that reduced your spam intake by almost 98% without any extra cost on cpu or bandwidth.

For antivirus filtering take a look at MailScanner ( http://mailscanner.info/ ) it integrates well into CentOS3 or 4. And can work with most antivirus scanners that work on Linux.

Johnny has a couple of excellent guides on his website at http://www.hughesjr.com/

---- I would agree with the above but I would recommend using ldap instead of mysql for users.

Not sure what you are looking for with web based user administration but suspect that webmin http://www.webmin.com is the answer for that.

Craig

Hi,

------------------------------------------------------------- after reading the posts o the list i've just installed & configured qmailtoaster on centos4-2 in less then an hour ( most of the time waiting for finishing the compilation process ) and everything works just fine out of the box.

webmail, pop3, imap, webfrontend, vacation, charts, .... everything you need, great!

thx Harald ------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks for pointing this out, but i'm looking for the CentOS base applications. Anyway, i'll try check it out incase CentOS don't have this solutions with thier base software.

Thanks In Advances, Regards, ijez

Hi,

...

The objective is, the mailserver will be easy to setup, maintained and have some

1. database backend for storing user info ( mysql? )

LDAP, almost everything can work with it out-of-the-box. SQL database support varries, and usually needs additional plugins. If you know exactly what you are doing, SQL might be good way to go regardless. With CentOS you get Postgresql and MySQL. Personally, I am fan of former, although later is more popular.

...

2. spam and antivirus filtering

For free, MIMEDefang, SpamAssassin, ClamAV. Commercial, I heard that Sophos antispam works fabolously.

...

3. webbase user administrations

I used custom made stuff. If you use Horde/IMP for webmail (there's also other applications from Horde framework for managing calendars, filters, and so on), Horde has some ability for web based user management too.

...

4. Provide smtp,smtps,pop3,pop3s,imap,imaps service

Sendmail or postfix (Sendmail has better plugin support for anti-spam/virus scanners, Postfix is easier to configure but is not as configurable as Sendmail). Dovecot or Cyrus (as packaged in CentOS it is really trivial to setup). Cyrus scales well, and is suitable for small and large installations. There's huge difference when opening mailbox with 40,000+ emails (and I've got couple of 'em) in Dovecot and Cyrus. So even if you have two users, Cyrus might be good way to go.

If you are going to do webmail too, Squirrelmail (or whatever it is called) is part of CentOS. Horde project has IMP (you'd need to install Horde, than IMP under Horde). Horde project also has bunch of additional applications that integrate with each other for calendaring, todo lists, generating server-side mail filters (supported are procmail for "unix-account-based" mailboxes, and sieve for Cyrus based mailboxes), and much more. Check http://www.horde.org/ for more info. Installing Horde/IMP for the very first time might seem a bit complicated since it requires bunch of additional PHP module, but it might be worth it.

Also, check "which imapd" thread from couple of days ago.

Thanks, this is really interesting since all the applications are CentOS default.. I need to study all those first and if you could provided any how-to or guide on integrating this, I'll really appreciates it.

Thanks In Advances. Regards, ijez