[ILUG] setting up a mail server

[Michael Conry]

Hi Brendan,
Hope you're keeping well!
saw your post on ILUG today about mailservers.  The link you got to help
with setting up sendmail is very useful, but i would *personally* recommend
against sendmail unless you have a particular reason to use it.  Other
mail-server options are:
    postfix http://www.postfix.org/
    exim    http://www.exim.org/
    qmail   http://www.qmail.org/

Which one you pick is a personal/religious choice ;-)
The reasons to pick any one of these rather than sendmail are:
    They are smaller.
    They tend to be more secure.
    They are generally easier to configure.

I have used postfix, and exim.  I found postfix nice and easy to use
(sendmail was very baffling for this beginner).  I chose it because it
was the alternative mail server provided by SuSE and was not up to
installing qmail by hand.  Recently I have started using exim, and have
to say that it is very easy to use.  Exim is the default server provided
with Debian linux.  Qmail is reputedly good, though i haven't used it.
I think someone on list mentioned that it was a bit non-standard (in the
sense of not sticking to GNU/Linux-norms), which would not surprise me
after installing some of the author's other software.
In any case, many distros (certainly debian) will ask you a few
pertinent questions during install which should give you a useful
configuration (at least one you can start from).

Note also, that  you will probably need to
run both a mail server (in the sense of a mail transfer agent (MTA)
which sends mail offsite, and receives incoming mail) and a pop3 server
which people can connect to with their mail clients to receive their
incoming mail.  An alternative to pop3 is imap.

Links which might be of interest:

The Linux Electronic Mail Administrator HOWTO
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Mail-Administrator-HOWTO.html
(I think Niall posted this too)

Also...
Hugh Sasse's Electronic Mail Related Information Page
http://www.eng.dmu.ac.uk/~hgs/e-mail/
This page has lots and lots of mail-related links.

I'll cc this on list so others can pick up my mistakes/heresies,
mail me if you want any more info/help
    mick

-- 
Key fingerprint = 5508 B563 6791 5C84 A947  CB01 997B 3598 09DE 502C
             http://mconry.ucd.ie/~mconry/mconry_gpg.asc