[ILUG] Tip - Web frontend for managing mail accounts

[John Allman]

For a long, long time now i've been looking to replace our out of date 
mail server with something newer and shinier and easier to maintain. And 
for me, ease of maintenance is synonymous with debian. But, qmail isn't 
in apt (thanks djb for your lovely licence) and if i have a debian box, 
there's no bloody way i'm manually keeping any software up-to-date on 
it. No problem you say - there are a lot of arguably better mta's that 
conveniently *are* in apt.

But. In order to replace our current server i would also have to 
continue providing everything it did. And on our old server we had 
qmailadmin and vpopmail which made handling email accounts dead easy, 
and more importantly, an administrative task not neccessarily done by 
me. So in our new mail server we needed something similar. We needed a 
mail server which could be managed via the web and protected against 
spam. I also wanted to switch from courier-imap to dovecot, partly 
because i keep hearing great things about it and i wanted to give it a 
try and partly because unlike courier-imap it does not use INBOX as a 
namespace and you dont have to make all your mail folders subdirectories 
of your inbox.

Enter vexim (http://silverwraith.com/vexim/). Now vexim doesn't claim to 
support dovecot, but it does have the option of using postgres as a 
database. So i figured (correctly) that getting it working wouldn't be 
too hard. I highly recommend this to anyone on the list. It's pretty and 
it does what it says on the tin perfectly. I now have a mail system with 
everything i wanted and then some. I now have an honest-to-god virus 
scanner working at smtp time (clamav). I can now manage which accounts 
should and should not be scanned for viruses and spam. I can choose on a 
per-account basis the spam score at which mails get flagged as spam and 
at what score they just get rejected. And there's more. If you're 
interested - go have a look!

For anyone trying to do what i did, i posted to the vexim list 
(http://keylime.silverwraith.com/pipermail/vexim/2004-July/002480.html) 
with some helpful pointers. It wont get you all the way there, but it'll 
get you close. If anyone tries it and gets stuck, feel free to send me a 
mail off-list.

Anyway - i just thought i'd share it with you as it's a bloody handy 
little tool.

John