Email servers: (Just some info I wish I had when I started the email server quest.) DONT FLAME ME :P

[Dre G.]

This goes out to 2 lists since I have seen some questions on this and I
feel the need to share my experiences with this since they are pretty
recent.

I run email for my own domain and of course provide it for others. 
Up until a year ago or so I was wondering what to do to get cool
@linuxjunkies.com addresses to go with my domain.. well another guy on
this list (torch) Steve M. and I just decided to go forth..

What we ended up with was

Postfix

Courier Imap

Courier Imap-ssl

Courier pop-ssl

pop-before-smtp

spamassassin

anomy

Squirrel Mail

pine

What we offer with it is a BUNCH of different ways for our local and
remote users to deal with mail on a daily basis,
We offer:

1 Secure Webmail, email using ssl on our web server for Squirrel Mail

2 Pine locally for shell users (imap dependent as well)

And the big one, 

3 Remote pop3-ssl with remote smtp server use across a wide range of
networks. 
This is the important one since I am letting users hit the pop server
from a vast array of places. The nets a hostile environment and I did
not want anyone to get their passwords jacked in the process, this seems
to have worked nicely so far.

We allow this by running pop-before-smtp which basically does just what
it sounds like, makes sure the users actually auth the pop server before
they are allowed to use the smtp server (you can specify different
timeout periods for this as well) , keeps the relaying down to a minimum
and we all like that right?

We do a pass off with all incoming mail to spamassassin and anomy before
it is delivered locally so EVERYONES email is tagged for spam as well as
any dumb attachments getting clipped. Even though this is
linuxjunkies.com I KNOW some of the users are going to use Outlook as a
client to check it their mail so we clip it! :)

We settled on this setup after trying to figure out ways to have one
lone email server out there serving mail for many people in every way
imaginable, We used to use wu-imap but ditched it for its NON support of
several features we wanted and we tested qmail setups along with several
other generic email servers not even worth mentioning. Qmail I really
did not like. This is going to sound silly but qmail just felt really
clunky, odd, and out of place for some reason to me, the whole
installation etc, maybe I just did not have any good docs to go off of
at the time or whatever but, understanding postfix and the other email
servers where a breeze.

Here are a few links that got me started maybe they will help someone
else along the way.
http://www.spamassassin.org/index.html
http://advosys.ca/papers/postfix-filtering.html <---- GREAT DOCUMENT!
MUST READ!
even if you Do not plan to use it there is still plenty of useful
information here
http://www.washington.edu/imap/IMAP-FAQs/index.html

OK so those links have proven use full to me in the past do what you
want with them. 

I do however have a question for others on the list that run multi
domain email servers, and please don't tell me to tear up my current
email servers because I'm NOT going to change them at this point, (aside
from using one of these 2 methods)

ldap or mysql auth?

http://kirb.insanegenius.net/postfix.html

I have this how-to and it seems to be pretty solid from what I read and
understand so far. If it seems not to be please share that information
with me.

-- 
Dre G. <enabled at linuxjunkies.com>