[UFO Chicago] e-mail help

[Nate Riffe]

On Thu, 28 Jun 2001, Thomas wrote:

> Ok guys, my lack of knowledge is by now pretty commonly known (I
> flaunt it enough), and normally I'd prefer to look stuff up for myself
> and try to figure it out, but now I'm in a bit of a bind.
> 
> In short I have an ISP who generally is reliable, but their mail
> server is not.  I've been asked to set up 3 new accounts, and change
> two, and I'm tired of outages with the ISP's System.  So I want to put
> in my own in house mail server.  I've taken a quick look and "e-smith"
> looks more or less like what I want... easy to set up and maintain (or
> so they claim) and I can always fall back to a Mac solution until I
> actually get it up and running.  So my question is this... what do I
> REALLY have to do to direct mail for my companies domain
> (dreamcolor.com) into my server?  Is it really as simple as calling my
> provider and telling them what IP address to send it to?  What else do
> I need to know?  I hate to put requests like this out there, but I
> only have about 24 hours to have a system up and running.  Any help
> would be appreciated... but if it gets too technical I'm libel to tilt
> my head from side to side like some poor mutt while I read it.

What you need running on your box:
0) An SMTP server
1) A POP and/or IMAP server

What you need to tell your ISP:
0) That your box, [insert hostname here], is the new mail exchanger
(MX) for the domain, [insert domain here].  They should know what this
means and make the appropriate change.

As far as SMTP servers go, sendmail is the de facto standard, but it's a
pain in the arse to configure it (I have a 1021 page O'Reilly book to
prove it).  I stopped using sendmail and started using postfix when I got
sick of keeping up with sendmail's security updates (postfix was written
by the venerable security guru Weitse Venma, author of tcpwrapper, among
others).  Some other choices are exim (the Debian default), smail (simpler
than sendmail), qmail (world's most secure MTA, written by Dan J
Bernstein, world's most paranoid security freak ... pain in the ass to
compile), ... the list goes on.  I'm quite happy with postfix.  It's
pretty easy to configure, too after you've spent about twenty minutes
reading the comments in the config file.

POP and IMAP servers are a dime a dozen, just use the one that comes with
your distro and you should be all set.

The last thing you'll need to do is set up the accounts for all the email
users on your current server.  The most straightforward thing to do is to
just create shell accounts for all of them on your box, but you might not
want that.  Most distros have an option to create "POP only" accounts,
which are exactly what they sound like.  There are fancier ways of doing
it that don't involve creating some kind of UNIX account (shell or
otherwise) but I've never tried to do that before.

> 
> Thanks in advance guys,
> 
> Tom
> 
> by the way... www.e-smith.com if you're interested in reading about it
> from the maker, or
> http://www2.linuxjournal.com/articles/linux_review/0046.html to read a
> review.
> 

Postfix good.  Me happy.

-Nate

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