Suggestions needed; mail server suggestions

[John Van Ostrand]

On Mon, 2007-07-09 at 10:06 -0400, Madison Kelly wrote:
>    I've been using Sendmail for many years now, despite a few (aborted) 
> attempts to move to other systems. Until now it has served me well.
> 
>    Thing is though, the number of email addresses and domains I host has 
> been growing (and with luck, will continue to grow). My issue is that I 
> don't like needing to have a shell account for each email address. This 
> is insecure to a degree and makes backup and recovery more difficult.
> 
>    So I want to move to a SQL-based mail server. I want to let users use 
> their email address as their POP3 username, for simplicity.
> 
>    So what then, good TLUG'ers, would you suggest I look at? All I am 
> asking for is pointers, but recipes would be appreciated!

There are three elements that I recommend. I recommend staying with
Sendmail, but if you prefer to move there are other alternatives that
will work with the rest of my recommendation. We've been using sendmail
since 1995 to handle virtual domains, it works and we find it easy to
manage on a single server using text config files that are pretty
straightforward. On some of our customers machines we combine sendmail
with OpenLDAP to do the same thing, but for multiple machine scenarios.

The second element is Cyrus-IMAP. This is a really efficient, very
capable MDA that supports lots of goodies. You can offer a full featured
webmail by combining it with something like squirrelmail (or something
newer). It supports sieve email filtering so you users can have easy
vacation handling on the server. You can support quotas per mailbox
(this should be big for an ISP.) The biggest thing that you might like
is that it doesn't require a system account to access a mailbox. Oh, and
it does POP3 too.

Finally if you really need MySQL you may have to bail on sendmail. I'm
not totally authoritative on sendmail, but I've not known it to handle
MySQL routing. It does support LDAP routing quite well.

One thing that this really works well for is multi-server solutions. If
you run your own spam filters or you need to spread accounts across
multiple servers, this solution supports it quite well. Using a shared
routing database means that all systems (including spam filters) know
valid email addresses and know where each mailbox resides. Spam filters
can then quite easily discard mail for unknown users.

You may even consider ISPMAN. It's a web-based ISP management system.
You centrally administer email and web domain handling including DNS,
aliases, etc. Then configuration daemons on your servers look for
requests and implement changes.

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John Van Ostrand
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