[ILUG] Mail-Server

[Kevin Philp]

Timothy Murphy wrote:
> On Thursday 30 April 2009 09:27:46 Frank Murphy (Frankly3D) wrote:
>   
>> I want to setup a mail-server later in the summer,
>> for my website(s) *ath frankly3d dhot chom
>> (to save size on my web-space)
>>     
>
> Sorry to show ignorance, but what exactly is a mail-server?
> Do you mean that people can send email directly
> to whoever@*ath frankly3d dhot chom ?
>
> If so, what is the advantage of this?
> Why not just collect email with IMAP or whatever
> from your ISP or place of work?
> Surely that does not use much web-space?
>
> Again, if you are talking about sending email too,
> what is the advantage of running your own smtp server
> as opposed to nominating your ISP as smart host?
>
>
>   

Lots of reasons you might want to do this. You could use a local mail 
server to spool mail before sending it to our ISP, you could use 
transfer your incoming mail from the ISP to your own mailserver and run 
it through spamassassin, clamav or whatever - gives you a chance to 
clean it up and you don't have to wade through endless spam. Maybe just 
a good learning experience. Generally you need a basic mail server even 
to pick up system messages.

On the downside you have an extra service to protect which is facing the 
big bad world.

 From my limited experience of running a small mail server. We run 
postfix, its easy to set up, has a nice webmin module to help the 
configuration and has a good security record. Exim is more complicated 
but more flexible. Others kicking around which you will hear about but 
probably should avoid are qmail (seems unsupported) and sendmail (the 
grand-daddy of mail servers). I am not sure what CentOS defaults to but 
its probably postfix or exim in which case the default will be a good 
choice.