[ILUG] mail server

[Philip Reynolds]

Declan Houlihan <deccy at csn.ul.ie> 29 lines of wisdom included:
> Hi Guys, how's it going.
> A friend of mine is setting up a server hosting a number of domains.
> I'm giving him a hand with it.
> 
> He wants to set up a mail server on this box. I've never set up 
> a mail server before and I'm wondering which one is the best to 
> set up. Should I use sendmail, postfix, qmail or something else 
> completely? Which is the most secure? which is the easiest to set up? 
> Whichever one I use it will need to support multiple domains. 
> Do they all do this?

Yes.

I think most people on this list will tell you to stay away from
sendmail, especially  if you've never setup a mail server before.

I would personally tell you to also stay away from qmail if you've
never setup a mailserver before, and you don't know the ins and outs
of how a mailserver works.

If I were you, I'd choose Postfix of Exim, because they're easy to
setup, flexible, have helpful user bases, and are package friendly
(RPMS and Debs are available for both).

Check out the features of both, more than likely you're not going to
be pushing the feature boundaries of either.

> I'd like to hear what experiences other people have had and if 
> anybody can point me to some good sites/documentation to get
> started that'd be cool.

www.postfix.org (and Ralf Hildebrand's website) for Postfix, and
www.exim.org for Exim. After that, google is your friend for
anything specific, and maybe this list after that.

Regards,

-- 
Philip Reynolds                      | RFC Networks Ltd.
philip.reynolds at rfc-networks.ie      | +353 (0)1 8832063
http://people.rfc-networks.ie/~phil/ | www.rfc-networks.ie