Re: Email Server
On Thu, 12 Jul 2001, Paul Rae wrote:
> High everyone, bit of a newbie when it comes to it but slowly trying to drag
> our systems from windows and first main task is mail...
>
> so ive got myself a nice server and played around with a few distros and
> have decided on debian and exmin
>
> right here comes the questions.....
<snipped question about exim, can't speak to it in particular>
> 2. when i was playing with other distros things went quite well in the
> testing apart from one thing... relaying. a lot of the users work out of
> the office using dialup and dynamic ips, whats the best way to enable
> relaying for this so that they can send and recieve mail but still not leave
> the server open? as i failed miserable on this one and it was either
> completely open, or denied relaying completely, not the ideal situation ;)
There's going to be some tradeoffs no matter what you do here. We'll
assume that an open relay is unacceptable.
* Disallow relaying, except for IP ranges you know your users will be
coming in on.
Pros: no additional configuration on their end
Cons: you have to figure out what they are, and depending on how much you
can narrow down the ranges, other people on the same range can abuse
your server (though not many). I used to work at an ISP that did this
for certain customers, and we rarely had a problem with it.
* SMTP Authentication
Pros: Clean; nobody can use your SMTP that you don't want using it
Cons: Additional end-user configuration. Not all mail clients support it
(or they don't support it the same way your SMTP server does). More stuff
that can go wrong. Yet another password to deal with.
* Have your users use their ISP's SMTP server, but still POP mail from you
Pros: No additional work for you
Cons: Their From: address will be their home email address. This may
or may not be acceptable, depending on circumstances.
There's other ways I'm not thinking of, I'm sure. Hopefully a magic bullet
is among them. :)
> 3. whats the best pop3 server to use with this, from what i have looked at
> qpopper seems to be quite popular, any other suggestions on this? a few
> people have suggested tpop3d but ive not been able to find out much about
> it.
I use qpopper and am quite happy with it. If you go with qpopper, I recommend
using 4.0.3 or better, rather than the 2.53 that's in Debian stable. 4.0.3
is more flexible in its configuration, for one. That, and there's this
ominous message on the qpopper home page that says "Don't use 2.53 with
Linux!" <shrug>
You can get 4.0.3 from www.eudora.com, or from the Debian testing
distribution. (If you do that, build it from the deb-src package. apt-get
can do that for you automatically. Of course, I'm assuming you're running
stable here.)
> 4. is there anything else i have missed / should be taking into
> consideration? or any other hints / tips to push me in the right
> direction....
Oh, probably. But I can't think of them right now. :) Good luck.
- Aaron
--
So: My point is that [Microsoft] may have a ton of money and be more
vicious than a junkyard dog, and have a stranglehold on dimwitted IS
managers, but they're just not very _competent_.
-- Rick Moen, on macosx-for-users
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