[K12OSN] Linux Email server suggestions

Dimitri Yioulos dyioulos at firstbhph.com
Wed Nov 14 15:59:48 UTC 2007


On Wednesday 14 November 2007 10:24 am, Calvin Dodge wrote:
> On Nov 14, 2007 7:00 AM, Tom Wolfe <twolfe at sawback.com> wrote:
> > I'm wondering what what folks suggest in the way of an email server. I'd
> > like to switch to a linux based solution as the system I inherited,
> > Merak,
>
> If you can dedicate a box with a decent CPU and at least 512 megs of
> RAM to the task, I'd suggest the open source version of Zimbra (which
> my employer has been using for a couple of years). Zimbra has nice
> web-based email (Ajaxified, so it looks and works _kinda_ like
> Outlook), along with scheduling and document creation/storage/sharing.
> It also does full text indexing of emails, so email searches run very
> quickly.
>
> Zimbra is supposed to be easily connected to an Active Directory
> server (I just haven't needed to do it, so I can't vouch for the ease
> of connection).
>
> If you want to put together the components, or your server needs to
> provide web pages to clients (Zimbra grabs ports 80 and 443 for
> itself, and I haven't researched to see if it can co-exist with
> Apache, since we have a dedicated email server), I'd suggest Postfix
> (more secure than sendmail, and easier to configure), a greylisting
> component (I use tummy.com's tumgreyspf, but there are others
> available) with a 1 minute time-out (too many servers try to resend
> before the default 5-minute time-out), Amavisd+Clamav+Spamassassin
> (for antivirus and antispam), and Bogofilter (final anti-spam layer).
>
> I'm not saying the above combination of components is the ideal one -
> simply that it works out of the box with minimal configuration, and it
> has consistently worked for every client I've set it up for.
>
> Calvin
>

Along similar lines as Zimbra is Scalix.  These products offer collaboration 
tools similar to MS Excahnge, like shared folders, shared calendars, etc.  
The free community versions don't offer all features available in the 
commercial versions. 

If you're looking for a straight-up mail server, there are many available - 
sendmail, exim, qmail, etc.  The best advice I can give would be to read up 
on 'em to see what features they provide, and what their set-ups entail.  I 
use the combination of sendmail, MailScanner, MailWatch, clamav, bitdefender, 
spamassassin, OpenWebmail (Web-based client), and synonym (mail archiver).  
This system  integrates with AD via samba.  It does take some work to set it 
all up, but the rewards are great

Dimitri

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