[olug] Email server

[Tim - DZ]

I also found qmailrocks.com to be a very valuable resource for getting all
that setup.

-t 

-----Original Message-----
From: olug-bounces at olug.org [mailto:olug-bounces at olug.org] On Behalf Of Ken
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 7:03 PM
To: Omaha Linux User Group
Subject: Re: [olug] Email server



Eric Penne wrote:
> I have an interesting situation that seems to be a big problem for the
> company  I'm working for.
> 
> They get all their email from Binary.net through POP3.  4 accounts total. 
> you all know the problems with POP3 for portability.  They each download
> the emails to their PCs.  There is not an individual backup plan for the
> individual PCs because nobody understands Outlook well enough to do
> anything with it.  The general managers computer crashed Monday and he
> can't access his old stuff now until it gets fixed (~1 week).
> 
> I suggested that they use a local email server to get their POP3 email. 
> Serve it up via IMAP to their local machines.  Then using Samba share that
> machines mail folders with the main backup server and do a weekly backup
> of the emails.
> 
> I'm figuring on using fetchmail for the POP3 side to Binary.net but I
> don't have a clue as to what I need on the local side.  I assume I'll need
> something like qmail or sendmail to distribute the incoming mail then some
> sort of IMAP server to the individual users.
> 
> Mostly this is confusion on my part about how the individual pieces fit
> together.  I also need reccommendations on a good IMAP server.  I'm pretty
> sure I'll use qmail and I see a few programs for IMAP with qmail.
> 
> Other options would be to put a spam filter on this IMAP server. 
> Something bayes like that would automatically run the false positives and
> false negatives every night or every couple of hours as long as they put
> them in the appropriate folder.
> 
> Does this sound like a reasonable solution?  Is fetchmail, qmail, and
> whatever IMAP server very hard to setup?  Would a PIII 700MHz with 128MB
> RAM work pretty well for this?
> 
> Later
> Eric Penne
> epenne at ieee.org
> 


I second the Qmail vote.  Actually this has always worked great for me:
Fetchmail + Qmail (with patches) + qmail-scanner + clamav + spamassassin 
+ squirrelmail + courier-imap + imapproxy + vpopmail + qmailadmin + isoqlog.

A bit of time to setup (not as bad as it sounds) but beautiful in 
action.  This gives you: smtp/smtps, pop3/pop3s, imap/imaps, webmail, 
virus scanning, pattern scanning, spam/bayes scanning and is proven to 
work with most all MUAs (including Outlook & OE).

It's probably a bit of overkill for 4 users but will be quite scalable. 
  The machine you listed would be able to handle this easily as long as 
your users aren't in the bulk emailing business.  The only concern would 
be storage in relation to how much you want to allow each user's mailbox 
to hold.  You could easily grab a second harddrive for the home/mail 
partition if they wanted to keep a year's worth of mail accessable on 
the server..

I'm going to try an make the installfest and would be happy to help if 
needed.
-Ken





_______________________________________________
OLUG mailing list
OLUG at olug.org
http://lists.olug.org/mailman/listinfo/olug