Mail server recommendations?

[der.hans]

Am 20. Sep, 2006 schwätzte Kenneth so:

> I'm beginning the process of learning about MTAs, MUAs, and whatever all
> those other acronyms are.  I have never had the need to set one up, and still
> don't really have a need but I thought I would add to my knowledge.

Are you wanting to run a full load of ISP mail services?

MTA
spam blocker ( maybe a seperate virus blocker as well )
delivery ( to the mailbox )
client daemons ( IMAP, POP )
webmail
backups
address book management

Is this just for you or also for others?
Is it for one domain or for multiple domains?
Do you want to also setup mailing lists?

> What are some good packages I should be looking at?  I did a quick install of
> qmail on Gentoo, but it doesn't seem to want to start up, it's looking for a
> whole bunch of files in /var/qmail/control that don't exist.  I'm not
> knocking qmail for this, at least yet.  I still have to look over the
> documentation more thoroughly, probably something I didn't do.

For an MTA I'd recommend postfix. Postfix and sendmail are, I think, the
most universally available MTAs. They're packaged for every distro and for
*BSD and other *NIXen. Postfix is considerably simpler than sendmail and
works well enough for all but a few mail environments.

For other services it will be easier if we first know what you want to do.
At that point it might also be obvious that the qmailtoaster or some
specific sendmail setup best fits your requirements.

ciao,

der.hans
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