Re: ISPmail Lenny tutorial ready
Christoph Haas wrote:
> Dear list...
>
> My new ISPmail tutorial for Lenny is out. Yay!
>
> For those who don’t know what I’m talking about: I’ve been maintaining a
> tutorial for configuring a Debian-server as a full-fledged email server
> (Postfix/Dovecot/Amavis/MySQL: POP3, IMAP, SMTP, spam fighting, virus
> scanning, webmail, MySQL backend) since the days of Debian Woody that has a
> growing fan base. Some of the new features are a simpler database schema,
> server-side Sieve filters, an introduction to logical volume management,
> quotas, SPF and DNS handling. And as usual it’s not just copy/paste style
> but spiced up with lots of explanations on the basics that a sysadmin needs
> to know to run an email server. There are also hints for readers of the
> previous Etch tutorial on how to migrate. A few pages of additional
> (non-essential) features will be delivered in addition soon (Backup MX with
> MySQL replication, mailing lists, DynDNS, policyd etc.).
>
> Comments welcome.
>
> Cheers
> Christoph
Hi,
I had a look at your tutorial, it's funny to see that it's very close to
what our control panel does. In fact, we do absolutely all of what is
described there, except that we don't use MySQL for postfix as we have
found that flat files are faster: the DB is just dumped into flat files.
The issue with having dbs for Postfix is that in many cases, something
can go wrong with your MySQL server. While this is fine for pop/imap,
it's not at all for mail delivery. Also, it's forcing you to have a
wrong db schema as it has to be what postfix expect.
On top of what you describe above, you panel does:
- tumgreyspf
- dkimproxy (filtering and scanning)
- some basic DSL stop rules (major source of spam)
- basic header and body checks
- delivery in a SPAM imap box (using maildrop)
- vacation messages
- mailbox quota
- SMTP and pop3 traffic accounting in real time (if using courier)
- MLMMJ lists management
And of course:
- root interface to add/remove domains
- virtual admin interface to add/remove email
- email panel so the users can change their mailbox parameters
Managing emails "by hand" on the shell is just not practical, IMHO.
Over the years, we have found that the biggest issue in this setup is
amavis. It's a dog: it takes an incredible amount of RAM and CPU for
what it does, and often crashes. Seems that the Lenny version is better
than the etch one (that was crashing for no reasons), but still, I don't
consider it a good product. Has anyone ever work with DSPAM? How is it
compared to amavis?
Also, does one of you know a way to get the traffic information out of
dovecot? We support Dovecot, but don't use it, just because of that.
It's a shame because Dovecot is a WAY faster than courier.
Last thing: I think it's a shame that, when you setup amavis, clamav,
spamassassin and postfix in Debian, they are not configured by default
to work together. There's a lot of scripting needed to do this setup,
and there's no way (because of the Debian policy) to do this in a Debian
package postinst script.
Thomas
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