On Tuesday, January 31, 2012 11:04:58 PM, Chris Joslyn wrote:
> You know the story. Boy sets up webserver. Boy helps nonprofit. Nonprofit
> wants boy to set up a mail server. It finishes somewhere with boy spending
> too much of his free time trying to read and remember how to do all this
> properly.

It gets a bit complicated.

> So.
> 
> I seek wisdom.
> 
> Facts:
> 
> Ubuntu 11.10
> Reverse DNS set up.
> Hostname set up.
> Postfix set up.
> I can send an email from the server from a command line email client. Good
> so far.

Outbound email is the easy part.

> Now I decide on server software. What say you? Dovecot
> <http://dovecot.org/>? Courier <http://www.courier-mta.org/>? Hormel
> herring<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mislead>?
> Something else?

I recommend Dovecot.  The Debian package for Dovecot also supports Sieve and 
ManageSieve; you probably won't need these for your current client but you 
might like these features for yourself.

Additionally I recommend installing PostGrey (greylisting), SpamAssassin 
(antispam), and ClamAV (antivirus).  All three will need hooks into the 
Postfix configuration to get them incorporated.  Each has documentation to 
incorporate into Postfix.  You'll need these three to minimize the amount of 
additional email administration headache you'll be living with.

If you want to make it easy on yourself, you could look for a web panel that 
does all this for you.  Someone I'm doing admin work for uses DTC for this, 
but I recommend looking into lighter alternative if you can find one.  Usually 
these panels incorporate virtual alias tables, which you'll like if the server 
eventually needs to host multiple email domain names.

Learn how to test the email server via telnet to port 25; you will need this 
to know that email works correctly.  This is something to repeat for each 
configuration change to verify that things work.

> Note: I doubt I'll need to set up webmail. Mostly, I'll forward email to
> other addresses not on my server.

If you do eventually need webmail, have a look at RoundCube -- it's the best 
webmail I've used so far.

  -- Chris

--
Chris Knadle
[email protected]
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