Phoenician wrote:
Just out of curiosity, what would people recommend for large scale email? (what distro and application)
1,500 mailboxes, 350-400 domains. Okay, but can you be more specific on "large scale"? How many emails sent/received per day? How many MB? How much storage capacity per mailbox?
What distro's are you familiar with?
What Mail Transfer Agents (MTA's) are you familiar with? Postfix? qmail? Sendmail?
What Win32 MTA are you transferring from? Exchange?
Do you have calendaring concerns which need to be addressed?
Mailing lists?
What DNS servers are you familiar with? Bind? djbdns?
What do you currently use to filter spam?
There are a couple people on the list with significant experience managing large scale email concerns. I'm not one of them ;) But that doesn't stop most people from venturing their opinion... (at least I've qualified mine).
I'd say use look for the "hardened" version of whatever distributions you are most familiar with. Failing that, take a gander at http://www.bastille-linux.org/. Read the hardening documentation twice. When you decide to stray from the documentation, slap yourself with a clue-by-four. Then subscribe to a mailing list or visit a forum specifically targeted for your hardened distro, read their faq, and ask for advice there.
On MTA's PostFix and qmail are both have a reputation for security. PostFix has a more active community. qmail is stuck in a minix like situation, where lots of people like and use it, but the author is so busy grinding his own personal copyright/licensing vendetta, that it's difficult for the community to support the code.
Mailman seems to be the best supported mailing list manager...
Evolution can handle calendaring. If I read right, it doesn't require a dedicated server like Exchange does. SuSE was working on an Exchange replacement as well. Perhaps someone else will have suggestions?
djbdns is a nice small secure dns server. Same licensing issue as qmail. Other people may have other suggestions...
Hopefully, someone will chime in with a list of spam filtering techniques. Automatic whitelisting of email recipients combined with baysian filters seems to go a long way toward cutting out spam. I'll leave suggestions of actual applications to others.
-- Garrett Goebel IS Development Specialist
ScriptPro Direct: 913.403.5261 5828 Reeds Road Main: 913.384.1008 Mission, KS 66202 Fax: 913.384.2180 www.scriptpro.com garrett at scriptpro dot com
On Mon, 2004-09-20 at 09:21, Garrett Goebel wrote:
Phoenician wrote:
Just out of curiosity, what would people recommend for large scale email? (what distro and application)
Distro is irrelevant unless you want it to hold your hand. Both of the Enterprise distro's have Wizards that allow you to set up an email server. More specifically though, with the enterprise versions you can do things like LVM and LDAP in a nice GUI interface.
1,500 mailboxes, 350-400 domains. Okay, but can you be more specific on "large scale"?
No matter how specific, the only FOSS answer to this question capable of handling this kind of load is Cyrus IMAP or POP with account data stored in LDAP. Also, I hope that hardware RAID5 + a backup solution is obvious.
What Mail Transfer Agents (MTA's) are you familiar with? Postfix? qmail? Sendmail?
I think you'll find that you will want to use Postfix in order to check LDAP for the existance of the account before delivery. Most of the HOWTO's for this specific problem out there use Postfix. SuSE Enterprise 9 comes with Postfix configurator. However, there are /many/ ways to do this. LMTP is the method by which Cyrus receives the mail from your MTA and it, too, may reject the incoming mail. Also check out Cyrus Sieve documentation.
What Win32 MTA are you transferring from? Exchange?
"IMAP suck" tools can handle transition no matter the source.
Do you have calendaring concerns which need to be addressed?
FOSS IMAP servers are thusly incapable of handling calendaring. However, there is a SuSE product called OpenExchange that can turn Cyrus+Postfix+Apache+WebDAV in to a Exchange emmulator and is somewhat compatible with ICAL (IIRC). So you can continue to use LookOut on Windows, but it's pricy because there's a proprietary piece of client software (MAPI provider) that must run on each of the Windows boxes. I suggest running a seperate WebDAV server and distributing the Mozilla Sunbird Calendaring Client. Evolution can also ICAL. But, that's a whole different project.
Mailing lists?
Mailman is compatible with all transport systems.
What DNS servers are you familiar with? Bind? djbdns?
All he needs is an MX record. Why does he need to know all of that?
What do you currently use to filter spam?
HOWTO's include SpamAssassin and Amavis setup instructions. No big deal. Amavis (antivirus) is almost certainly something you want to configure if Windows is in the network.
I'd say use look for the "hardened" version of whatever distributions you are most familiar with. Failing that, take a gander at http://www.bastille-linux.org/. Read the hardening documentation twice. When you decide to stray from the documentation, slap yourself with a clue-by-four. Then subscribe to a mailing list or visit a forum specifically targeted for your hardened distro, read their faq, and ask for advice there.
Whatever you choose, be sure that its either sufficiently mainstream that any HOWTO on the Internet would be compatible with your distro OR make sure your distro vendor provides support. Also, expect to spend a LONG time reading every last scrap of information you can find on Cyrus -- it's perhaps the most complex piece of software with the least amount of (correct) documentation available for Linux. I've banged my head on my desk several times over this one.
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Garrett Goebel -
Jason Clinton