[K12OSN] Linux Email server suggestions

Calvin Dodge caldodge at gmail.com
Wed Nov 14 15:24:43 UTC 2007


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




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