HI,

my new offce has mail server running on windows2000+hmail server. since there are serveral probs poping up each day my management has asked me the possibility of switching to linux. i dont have the implementation knowledge of any linux mail servers,ofcourse the management is not going to spent any more fund in this , I am planning to use an opensource mail server with linux OS. which mail server should i choose?

1)qmail
2)sendmail
3)postfix
3)any other suggestions?

here we have 5-10 sites and mail accounts in all sites would sum up to about 500. i dont think there is heavy mail traffic (only 100-150 mails pass by each day).

I am planning to use truxtix 2.2 or CentOS, i belive these are also opensource operating systems.

any suggestions will be most welcome if they point out the pros and cons.

There are many howtos available for qmail. In addition to www.qmailrocks.org, there is another good one listed in my signature. These will make your installation go very smoothly, but I recommend a version of Linux that "plays well" with qmail. Fedora/RH seem to be qmail-friendly.

If you can find other howtos for postfix or other mail servers, then go for it. But from my experience, qmail seems to have many howtos available that the other MTAs do not.

I've heard that qmail is the best.

Or at least the most secure mail server. This is very interesting: http://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html

I’m using rhel3 in an enterprise environment (I will update soon to rhel4). The site is not so big (100 accounts, max 300-400 mails per day). I am using sendmail just because the former admin has installed it. I would have installed qmail. Maybe when I upgrade to rhel4 I will implement qmail. I had no problem with sendmail until now and a rule of thumb says "if it's not broke don't fix/change it" so maybe I stay with sendmail

I've just forgotten something: When I've installed qmail it seemed to me more difficult as sendmail and I don't thing there are more tutorial/books for qmail as for sendmail. So here sendmail wins (difficulty + materials for studying). Just my opinion...

The number of books is growing. Oriely now has one written by John Levine. The qmail Handbook is written by Dave Sill. Both of these are excellent. There are also excellent resources on the web, such as the qmail mailing list where you'll find some of the smartest admins on the internet today and each one well-versed in qmail administration. Honestly, the howtos I mentioned above will give you such a nice platform to start from, you don't really need to learn much unless you just want to know more.

QMail Rocks man!! Qmail is the best, i have been using qmail from last 2 years on my mail server.Got 25 domains on it around 7000 users on it .Runs smoothly no probs at all.

My vote goes with Qmail.

hi,

Thanks every one for the valuble tips, i'll go for qmail. any suggestions on the said OS (trustix2.2 or CentOS)?. Does qmail go well with any of them?

You can get a lot resources on qmail at http://www.qmailrocks.com as well as http://www.lifewithqmail.com .
Most of the qmail installations are done on the base of the documentation provided by these sites.

CentOS 4 comes with postfix (and probably exim) so you won't have to install those separately. Postfix is also well supported, highly secure and well-maintained.

I would go for Postfix + Dovecot for IMAP + Squirrelmail for Webmail, since you won't have to manually update or configure much beyond the included packages. Webmin is a separate download that includes a nice control panel for Postfix as well as most other bits of the system.

Manually putting together and maintaining a qmail system for a hundred users (small beans in mail server terms) seems like a waste of effort.

Well i would say if you want really stable system then go for Debian Linux. Most linux flavours are preety much same. But if you really need nice gui and support then suse rocks. Or if you want free stuff then you can go for fedora. I personally prefer Debian and suse. Please note than Debian is little hard to configure and play around.

Noaman

For mail handling i would say use Sendmail, for webmail go for horde since its database based but if you want a nice looking webmail which is easy to configure then go for squirrelmail.

Noaman

Note that each version of Fedora and SUSE Pro only receive updates for 18 months. For a mail server an "enterprise" distribution (slower release cycle, longer support periods, more tested) is best. RH Enterprise or SUSE Enterprise have support contracts, CentOS or Debian stable if you are going to entirely self-support.

I would always advise people against the current sendmail, because all of the competitors are more efficient and secure as well as being much easier to configure (and therefore maintain).

I didn't find sendmail that difficult to configure and I have it running with spam assassin and clamav antivirus and mime defang. Security hasn't been a problem and sendmail hasn't even had an advisory in two years. There is also a ton of information on setting up and configuring sendmail. Not that there is a problem with the other mail servers, in fact we also use qmail in our corporation. Sometimes I think sendmail gets a bad rap without cause.

These days it's more that exim and postfix are simply better - postfix is heavily designed for security and uses less resources, exim is highly flexible. Both scale to the largest installations, and use standard text files for configuration, removing the extra hassle and risk of error of the sendmail method.

Qmail means no vendor support or integration with the distribution, because of the licence, so I think that you have weigh carefully whether the benefits are worth the maintenance overhead.

I definitely agree with your analysis of the Qmail license. Personally the license would be enough for me to avoid using it, but as for our corporate email I am out of the loop on decision making for the particular domains that it is used for. I guess I am comfortable with the sendmail config method, but that is because I really had no choice at the time but to learn it. Does anybody have more details or experience with using Exim or Postfix with things like Spam Assassin, mime defang, clamav or their equivalents. This should probably be a separate thread, but how about a quarantine system for incoming emails. Anyone with experience in setting a quarantine system up?