# Running a mailserver, which applications?

## John5788

I'm considering starting up a new mailserver on a spare box that I have. I used to run a courier-imap/postfix/squirrelmail set up on my freebsd boxes, but that was a long time ago. i just want to get some ideas on what set ups people are running these days. post what you are running / would run for a mailserver.

----------

## erik258

John, 

I use postfix for the mailserver, with courier-imap-ssl for imap access, and squirrelmail for online mail access.

I also use spamd to identify spam.

----------

## jongeek

postfix++

courier-imap-ssl++

I pipe my mail through spamassassin using procmail. It works, but my needs are basic since I don't get much spam.

Oh, and I use horde for webmail. I installed it because it offers shared calendars and some other neat web-based stuff. But I find I only really ever use the webmail interface, so its overkill. I used to use squirrelmail, and it worked very well also.

----------

## AllenJB

I found a postfix/dovecot setup to be easy and flexible

----------

## John5788

i guess I'll stay with the postfix/courier-imap/squirrelmail route then, seems as if its still a good choice.

heh, i remember how much of a PITA the main.cf/master.cf files are now, great!

----------

## bartlm

You might be interested in having a look at amavis.

Imho quite a good pice of virus scanner.

----------

## b3cks

 *AllenJB wrote:*   

> I found a postfix/dovecot setup to be easy and flexible

 

I can confirm that. Furthermore using Amavisd-New for anti-spam and anti-virus.

----------

## c00l.wave

Postfix & Courier-IMAP (+SSL) by mainly following the virtual mailhosting guide (using MySQL for account and alias configuration; I don't like using real system accounts for email). You may want to edit the configuration further, though (such as checking for existence of accounts before acceptance etc.). Make sure to avoid/minimize backscatter spam: http://spamlinks.net/prevent-secure-backscatter.htm

Maildrop for advanced filtering

mailman for mailing lists

policyd-weight to check for known spammers using multiple RBLs before mails are accepted

mailgraph to check statistics from time to time (in case you are abused for backscatter spam or have some misconfiguration you will see that quite clearly)

----------

## arndawg

I'm a courier user and i'm not impressed by the speed i'm getting when using different webmail software when the mailboxes gets bigger.

You should take a good look at dovecote vs courier before making your choice.  :Smile:  I'm certainly migrating to dovecote when i have the time.

----------

## boerKrelis

Postfix, virtual domains and virtual users in mysql

Postfixadmin to manage that

dovecot-lda as LDA so you can use SIEVE filtering and have quota support

gld for greylisting

Dspam in daemon mode + dovecot-antispam for well... antispam. Dovecot-antispam is marvelous. You should read the docs on dspam wrt groups, shared signatures and inoculation. It allows you to do really neat things like having users whose jugment you can rely on inoculate other users with their signature collection.

I reroute mail that DSPAM thinks is spam to user+spambox@domain. The Dovecot-LDA delivers mail to user+foo@domain to the 'foo'-mailbox inside the maildir of user foo, *if it exists*. So users can turn off the spamfilter just by deleting the spambox-folder, as that would deliver mail to user+foo@domain in the inbox. They can train the filter by moving mail to and from this folder. So all the spam management happens from within the IMAP-client, which is something most users can understand.

Added advantage is that if you have some special project or something you just change your FROM: to you+projectfoo@domain, communicate this to your project partners, make a folder 'projectfoo' and voila, all your incoming mail regarding project 'foo' is delivered to the 'projectfoo'-folder.

and dovecot itself, of course

and roundcube for webmail

top it off with mailman.

----------

## John5788

thanks for all the input guys, really appreciate it.

i took a look at the virtual hosting with postfix guide at: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/virt-mail-howto.xml and didnt have luck with it.

followed all the steps except the SSL/encryption stuff, but when I got to the end, postfix wouldnt reply on port 25 anymore. the process was active and the port was open, but postfix just wouldnt respond. I narrowed it down to this line in my main.cf, following the guide in the link:

virtual_alias_maps = mysql:/etc/postfix/mysql-virtual.cf

I did have that file and the right information in it. I commented the line out, reloaded postfix and it was replying on port 25. Uncomment it, reload, and postfix was gone.

anyone have ideas? I am new to this virtual hosting for mailservers, have never done it before, but it does sound like a good idea since I want to host multiple domains on this box.

----------

## boerKrelis

Bump up the debug level in master.cf and look at the logs. What does it say?

----------

## John5788

where are the logs found? i couldnt find them in /var/log anywhere. do I have to enable logging somewhere?

----------

## boerKrelis

Postfix uses the system logger. You'd have to take a look at your system loggers' config (metalog/syslog-ng/etc). Make sure it's started.

If you haven't yet installed a system logger (as per the gentoo install docs), I can recommend metalog.

----------

