Viraj's Weblog

I do some consulting every now and then, and a recent project requires that I setup a Linux mail server for about 50 users.

Now this sounds like a very simple project, but I have been using CommuniGate Pro for so long that I've become unfamiliar with the current state of the art in free mail servers. I had some good experience with Postfix in the past, and I damn sure don't want to use Sendmail. I spent a few hours searching and found dozens of Postfix + SASL + Cyrus + IMAP + BLAH + MORE + WORK + THAN + NECESSARY guides. They are great and all, but honestly why does setting up an email server need to be so complicated?

Is there no free CommuniGate Pro equivalent out there? The closest thing I found was Courier, but it seems no one is using this as a complete server, and just using parts like IMAP. Maybe I'm wrong to look for an all-in-one solution. After some more research, the best combination of tools in my opinion for this project would be:

• Postfix (SMTP)
• Dovecot (IMAP/POP3)
• Mailscanner (SpamAssassin and ClamAV)
• Optional MySQL user database

Everything else just seems messy to me. For my project it doesn't really make sense to have a 'virtual' domain setup, and instead I can just use local user accounts. The drawback is, since they are hashed passwords, client login is required to be plaintext. That shouldn't be a problem when using SSL, but still bothers me. One option is to store the passwords plaintext in a MySQL database, and configure the SASL stuff to authenticate via that.

A goal is to let this customer manage users via a web interface, but I've found no such tool. I was thinking if I just use system accounts, Webmin for account maintenance should be easy enough. Or maybe just some simple python scripts.

Anyhow, I setup a wiki page with some more info.