mail server setup

[Janina Sajka]

Juan Hernandez writes:
> I need webmail, imap, virtual domains, spam/antivirus protection, etc.

Let's take them one at a time ...

webmail
This one is easy. Go with squirrelmail .

 imap
 Another easy one, dovecot .

 virtual domains
 Any mta worth its salt will give you this. It's pretty trivial, e.g. in
 sendmail you simply add domains into a config file, one per line. If
 need be, you can get more elaborate, e.g. direct mail addressed to
 a at b.c. to d at e.f. It's all very doable.

 spam/antivirus protection
 This one is more complicated, and more important. I'm sure you're not
 interested in becoming an open relay for every spammer on the planet?
 So:

 Antivirus -- You probably only care if you have users on Windows.
 clamav is my choice for this, though mine is curently broken--I don't
 have windows clients.

 anti-spam -- much of this depends on a good mta configuration. Today's
 mta's, you'll probably select either sendmail or procmail, set you up
 by default with a pretty good configuration. You'll want to carefully
 read your way through the config file to understand what's going on.
 This is the starting point.

 Next is the process of sorting the mail that arrives into "probably OK"
 and "probably junk" piles. People used to rely on spamassassin for
 that, but I found it far too resource heavy and stopped using it about
 two years ago. I'm now using crm114. And, with Jason White, I'm looking
 at possibly moving to rstampd .

 In any case, you'll want to configure dkim and dmark for your mta.
 These assist the net in assuring you and everyone else that what you
 receive, and what you send is legit.

 Spam is a never ending battle. Expect to need to work on your
 configurations and approaches from time to time as the months and years
 go by.

 If this sounds daunting, that's probably good. It's not a trivial task,
 but it can be fun and certainly can be rewarding. I certainly have no
 interest in giving up my setup for some service somewhere else.

 hth

 Janina



-- 

Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.443.300.2200
			sip:janina at asterisk.rednote.net
		Email:	janina at rednote.net

Linux Foundation Fellow
Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup:	http://a11y.org

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Chair, Accessible Platform Architectures	http://www.w3.org/wai/apa