Begin
On 2006-10-16, "james <at> hal-pc.org" <"james <at> hal-pc.org"> wrote:
> I'm looking for some suggestions before diving into my first mail
> server. This will be for 5 users tops and I'm not looking to make
> administration of it a full time job.
The problem there is that MUAs, MTAs, and so on are prone to attract
holy wars. In the following you'll be reading my opinion. I think you'll
have to invest a bit more effort than may seem warranted for just five
users. See it as a learning experience.
> Xmail seems to be a good start for me, because from what I've been
> reading, using sendmail/postfix + qpopper + fetchmail seems a little
> daunting to maintain and secure.
The xmail I found in my local ports collection was a GUI type MUA.
You're probably thinking of something else, so I won't comment.
While sendmail will be more than capable to do the job, it is also
something I don't care to roll configurations for, even with the m4
preprocessor. I liked exim a lot, altough ``the specification''
(==the docs) takes some getting used to. The book is worth it.
I haven't used postfix but I hear it's quite acceptable.
Fetchmail is fairly straight forward if you understand what it does,
altough getting it exactly right for your situation can be tricky. Once
gotten right you only really need to touch its configuration whenever
your service provider changes things. I'm not aware of much other tools
that do what it does.
qpopper appears to be a pop3 server, which I'd think is a missed chance
at introducing IMAP. Others here (see dejagoogle) think dovecot is the
bees knees. I haven't used it. I've used courier imap and that worked
pretty well, altough the maintenance interface didn't scale too well.
But then, my userbase was a bit bigger.
> Webmail isn't all that important, but it would be a nice bonus
> (squirrel mail maybe?).
That works, altough you might need to put an upper limit on its use of
resources and that can cause weird failure modes if the imap box it
talks to is too big. Think several thousand mails in a single folder. It
is good practice to not let folders get too big anyway, that's what imap
has subfolders for. Oh, and it uses php4, so that in itself is a bit of
a liability. It can be dealt with reasonably adequately, though.
> This is simply a learning experience so doing things the "UN*X way"
> may be more beneficial from an employment standpoint and I may end up
> going the later route.
I think that if you want to understand the parts you'd do well to
try and integrate the different components that each do their thing.
Also because you can upgrade the individual parts if they happen to
sport vulnerabilities. All in one solutions are nice for ``turn key''
appliances sold at a nice markup, but don't help you understand it all
much. Especially if you're going to end up filtering spam and malware an
appliance won't be powerful enough.
> The most important thing though is security. I'm looking for any
> pitfalls or other gotchas that lead to an open mail relay or other
> security nightmare.
Well, there are several protocols involved each with its own pitfalls.
Most MTAs come with relaying disabled by default nowadays. I heard that
le plus ultra of integration, that thing from redmond, didn't.
--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
This message was originally posted on Usenet in plain text.
Any other representation, additions, or changes do not have my
consent and may be a violation of international copyright law.
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