Building a mail server
I run a small server that is used for myself and some friends and family to
host email, webpages, etc.
I'm looking to put a new mail server into place and after much research I'm
even more confused than ever, and I'm looking for some advice. I've look at
many packages, but I might be missing a few or maybe even missed that one
package could be setup in a special way.
I'm currently using sendmail, qpopper, and openwebmail. Although this setup
works, it's lacking in some features I would like.
Requirements (mostly standard stuff):
1) maildirs - I've been told that maildirs is less CPU intensive since the MUA
doesn't have to scan through huge mailbox files. I also like that one mangled
message isn't going to corrupt a whole mailbox. The other option I was
thinking about was Cyrus or maybe find something that stores mail in mySQL,
but many people seem to talk badly about 'proprietary' mail storage formats.
2) virtual domain support
specifically I like the sendmail style virtusertable:
bob@domain.com: user1
@domain.com: user2
3) imap - Cyrus or Courier seem to be the current top contenders.
4) webmail - I like openwebmail, but it only does mbox mail spools.
Squirrelmail seems to be the most popular here.
5) smtp auth - Sendmail had a patch/configuration option for this.
pop-before-smtp is an option, however I like the smtp auth method better.
It'd be nice if I could have everything behind SSL and still have it
compatible with the popular windows MUAs.
6) pop3 - pretty standard, just needs to work.
Now the optional requirements. These are things I would REALLY like to see,
but I could live without. So any suggestions that could get me the closest to
all of these is best.
1) Server based filtering, What I'm really looking for here is the ability to
sort all my mail by domain. So maindomain.com mail would end up in INBOX/,
but domain1.com mail would end up in INBOX/domain1.com/. This really ties to
the IMAP, as those are the folders I would be sorting into, and I'd like the
filtering to happen on the server so it's already filtered no matter what MUA
I'm connecting with. It could also be used for just general mail filters like
filters mailing lists to different folders. Right now I color code my
messages in OE so I know what mail server it came from, but I can't seem to do
that in IMAP.
It would be nice to be able to setup the filters from the MUA, but I'm
guessing thats going to be pretty rare or impossible to find. It wouldn't be
too horrible to have to do it manually from a shell, as the people using this
feature would be the more advanced users.
Along this line also the POP3 server shouldn't distinguish between the
filtered mail and just kick it all out like a normal pop3 server. (The filter
could possibly add some X- header to signify the sorting for pop users.)
2) virtual users. Currently everyone has thier own account on the system, and
mail is delivered according to the virtusertable. I have some family members
that don't really know how to use a shell account, so I'd like the ability to
not have to open that account for them. I'd rather have virtual users than
having to take measures to lock the account. So I would still need that
virtusertable functionallity, but it would have to be able to deliver to
virtual accounts as well.
3) spam and virus scanning. This seems pretty trivial to implement. Mainly
I'd like to have the spam filters, but virus scanning is a plus as well.
SpamAssassian looks good, but I'm not sure if there are any virus scanners
that wouldn't cost too much for a small server like this.
4) fetchmail or something like it that could run globally for all users like
every hour and inject the messages into the maildir/IMAP. Again if I could
filter this so messages from myisp.com went into INBOX/myisp.com/ I would be
happy.
At this point I know I'm going to have to change webmail systems, and I need
to decide on an IMAP server. Not even sure what's available for a server-side
filter, and what MTAs it's compatible with. Sendmail is the tried and true
proven system, but from what I understand it doesn't support maildirs, which
makes postfix look good, as postfix also seems very popular. Courier-IMAP
seems to be popular, but I'm not sure what the difference is between that and
Cyrus. The whole Courier mail system (mainly the MTA) doesn't seems to be
very popular in general, and I have yet to figure that out.
So can anyone give me some idea of what they run, or suggestions of what to
use that could be configured to do a lot of this stuff? Ease of install isn't
really an issue, as I really don't have to do that very often. Ease of use
and maintenance is a big issue, as I don't want to have to go through a 50
step process every time I add a new user.
Thanks,
Jeff
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