# What's the de facto Mail/Groupware solution?

## humbletech99

Hi,

  I'm trying to find the biggest best Mail/Groupware solution, the de facto, preferably with a MySQL backend. I'd like to find the champion, equivalent of Apache for Web or Bind for DNS. It's for a new Gentoo mail server. Taking all bets...

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## ASID

I don't believe there is a de facto solution. There are many good tools but nothing above all. eGroupWare is a good solution http://www.eGroupWare.org/ which uses mysql and php. 

I've used it for more than a year and had no problems. Give it a try   :Wink: 

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## humbletech99

we actually have egroupware, need a good mail solution though, one that holds all company contacts, I don't think felamail is very good...

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## ASID

 *Quote:*   

> need a good mail solution though

 

You mean a good mail client solution or a mail server? I'm not sure about what you are looking for. 

As a Web based mail client, egroupware is a good one and has the addressbook if you want to keep your contacts. Another solution if you don't like eGroupWare is squirrelmail http://www.squirrelmail.org/ 

```
emerge squirrelmail
```

If you are looking for a good mail server you must first decide if you want to use POP or IMAP. I'm using postfix 

```
emerge postfix
```

 as my IMAP(S) server and never had a problem nor a complain   :Very Happy: 

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## humbletech99

I'm looking for a good mail server with IMAP and SMTP. It's kinda bugging me that there isn't an obvious champion, choice is good, but I like things more clear cut, like running a web server is a no brainer, it's apache, and for dns it's got to be bind or djb. I prefer one excellent solution than several mediocre ones. It's like if you wanted a mail server on Windows, you'd buy Exchange, without question...

I'd rather spend less time trying to weigh up rivals and spend more time implementing and improving things, but if you don't know where to start it really drains time trying to find the best solution.

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## ASID

Well, I vote for postfix. Take a look at its features http://www.postfix.org/features.html

It's light, dead easy to configure and supports many features. 

I had the same question more than a year ago, I made a lot of searching, I found no de facto solution and gave postfix a try. 

I didn't regreat it. Try it   :Wink: 

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## humbletech99

Our small remote office actually has Postfix and we are running Exim. My colleague who has been doing this has been looking around at many alternatives and is now looking at dbmail. He doesn't seem impressed with either the Exim or Postfix we currently have otherwise I think we'd have settled on them.

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## Chris W

 *humbletech99 wrote:*   

> I'm looking for a good mail server with IMAP and SMTP.

 

Not likely to find both of these in one piece of software.  SMTP is how mail gets from sender to your inbox.  IMAP is for picking up and managing mail already delivered to your inbox.   

My choices:  Courier IMAP.  Postfix. The 'obvious' choice for SMTP on UNIX is Sendmail, but that's a real challenge to configure well.  Postfix is much easier to configure and a good solution even for busy sites.

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## humbletech99

I'm well aware of the difference - probably didn't phrase my question right, although I think Courier does both sides of the equation...

I've been avoiding sendmail for this reason of difficult config, you gotta learn m4 language or something...

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## DaveArb

 *humbletech99 wrote:*   

> need a good mail solution though, one that holds all company contacts

 

 *humbletech99 wrote:*   

> I'm looking for a good mail server with IMAP and SMTP.

 

You're asking for different things in different posts. What you've done, I think, is fallen prey to the Microsoft Exchange "one giant monolithic POS that tries to do it all" mindset. This is, in my unfortunately experienced opinion, a mistake.

SMTP is the most abused of all the protocols on the 'net. What you want in an Internet-facing SMTP server is a system that does one thing only, SMTP, and does it exceptionally well. All the other silliness, mail pickup with IMAP and company contacts and whatever bells and whistles the bosses want, put them in different software that is protected from the Internet and the SMTP server.

I believe it was your poll I just responded to in Gentoo Chat on this subject. In case not, although I'm a sendmail admin (and it really isn't as damn hard as people have been led to believe), I recommend Postfix for Gentoo users, the support for it here is excellent.

Dave

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## humbletech99

thanks Dave!

Indeed, you see through to this former exchange admin, but really I know that they are separate things, so maybe I should have said "what combination would you recommend?"

How could the IMAP etc be protected from the SMTP machine, doesn't it need to deposit emails somewhere the IMAP server can get them?

unfortunately, the mail server is very old, redhat 6.2 (yuk) with the deprecated (for good reason) mbox format. I don't expect this migration to be painless...

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## DaveArb

 *humbletech99 wrote:*   

> How could the IMAP etc be protected from the SMTP machine, doesn't it need to deposit emails somewhere the IMAP server can get them?

 

Protected from can mean different things. In one regard, simply using different software for IMAP and SMTP protects the IMAP, in that you then can take the SMTP server down without having little gripe messages show up on all the users' mail clients when they try to autocheck their mailboxes. One of the little things that mean a lot to me...  :Wink: 

I'm a huge believer that simpler is better, and would evaluate what features you actually need (particulary WRT the Internet-facing portion of the system.) If you don't need SASL, don't install it. Ditto if you don't need to access IMAP from the Internet, just firewall it off. The service that cannot be reached is a lot harder to compromise. I read a lot of questions about mail systems here on f.g.o from hobbyists that have, to my way of thinking, astonishingly complex setups. That's cool because they obviously are using these machines as learning tools. But for my job, what I want is a nice simple system that just keeps on working, so people don't gripe at me and I can do the parts of my job that I enjoy more.

What I actually use here, as I mentioned earlier isn't necessarily what I'd recommend or even do again (today is particularly touchy since a exploit fix for sendmail just came out yesterday). For reference anyway, I use sendmail/cyrus-sasl/uw-imap. We don't have company contact lists at all, so I don't have a recommendation there.

Dave

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## humbletech99

yes i noticed that, you'd better upgrade to Sendmail 8.13.6 asap. If I'm not mistaken, isn't sendmail one of those classic unix things that's not had a spotless security record, kinda like Bind?

Perhaps Postfix is the wiser choice for the uninitiated, but then how do people become initiated and won't sendmail's user base decline and be replaced, killing it slowly?

I got spoilt by Exchange 2003 at my last place, if it was free we'd run it without a doubt, but it's not so we won't, was nice to have a global address list visible to all client and integrate with all details you could sent straight off, as well as an internal company address list, nice Mail Tracking Center too... good features...

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## DaveArb

 *humbletech99 wrote:*   

> yes i noticed that, you'd better upgrade to Sendmail 8.13.6 asap.

 

It's going to be a hard flaw to exploit, there are no known instances of it yet. That doesn't mean I get to be complacent, but I'm not going to jump off a cliff either. I'll do the upgrade this afternoon, or tomorrow at the latest.

 *humbletech99 wrote:*   

> If I'm not mistaken, isn't sendmail one of those classic unix things that's not had a spotless security record, kinda like Bind?

 

When you look at the security record of Unix software that's been around a couple decades or more, you need to recall that it was a much different network back then. History: The first version of sendmail shipped with 4.1c BSD. That's also the first version of Berkeley Unix that included TCP/IP.  :Wink: 

The last security-related upgrade to sendmail was in 2003, IIRC. That's not too bad for software that complex, IMHO.

 *humbletech99 wrote:*   

> Perhaps Postfix is the wiser choice for the uninitiated, but then how do people become initiated and won't sendmail's user base decline and be replaced, killing it slowly?

 

That's evolution in action. If Postfix can provide the features that are actually needed, and accomplish it better than sendmail, then sendmail deserves to go away. I doubt it will happen during my career (assuming retirement at 65 I only make it to 2025.) I don't really think it's fair to categorize Postfix as being "good enough, if you don't want to learn the Big Gun". For what I want an MTA to do (receive the damn mail messages, is almost entirely all I want), I believe it does a good job. The concern that kept me away in the past was limited documentation.

Where sendmail still rocks is in support for really arcane features. It pretty much has set the standard for features forever. Thing is, how many of us in 2006 need, for example, a UUCP gateway for our mail system?

Dave

I'm going to end up talking myself into a conversion here...

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