David Fairey wrote:

Adam Bower adam@thebowery.co.uk wrote:

...

What kind of mail server do you need? Do you need pop or imap? do you need webmail or not? how many users do you have? will you be doing virus-scanning and spam filtering or not? what hardware will you be running this server on? how much mail do you deal with?

Sorry to be so useless, but the answers do sort of depend on some of these.

OK sorry to be so loose in the spec.

Basically looking at around 150 people who need POP3 access, no webmail needed and some external users could look at using IMAP+SSL.

• Virus Scanning is a necessity as are mailing lists
• spam-filtering would be good (although we already have Brightmail

filtering at the ISP-level).

• The hardware is yet to be decided, but something quick ;-)
• Haven't established exact mail counts, but possibly around 1000-2000 a

day (mostly internal)

No problem with any of that. Postfix, Courier, Amavisd, Spamassassin, ClamAV, Squirrelmail (if you need external web-based access, requires IMAP). Would recommend you use IMAP as then incoming and outgoing email can be backed-up and shared if required.

...

(although, spamassassin seams to have run out of steam for me, anyone got any good anti-spam software suggestions?)

Works for us. We use Rules-du-jour, updated regularly, to keep the extra rules up-to-date. Gentoo (our preferred platform, has an ebuild for that.

I'd be interested in suggestions too, I understand that bayesian-filtering doesn't scale well in corporates?

There are ways of doing it, but it requires user input/effort, which is often lacking. The downloaded rules are pretty good, IMO. Frankly, using the RBLs is the best way, but it can be a bit blunt. wanadoo, for instance seem to be relisted with boring regularity, and a lot of UK people use them.

Cheers, Laurie.

Stuart Fox wrote:

I use postfix+courier+amavis+clamav+spamassassin+mysql+squirrel

Using mysql mean you have virtual users and not those pesky real unix accounts.

Yeah, I forgot to mention that. We use virtual accounts in mysql as well, and it works really well, making management a doddle.

It also depends on what hardware you have, spam and av scanning can be expensive.

Yes, true. We've found that using a virtual disk helps a huge amount with scanning for spam and viruses. Memory is relatively cheap these days, and considerably faster than a physical disk.

I mostly followed this howto http://genco.gen.tc/postfix_virtual.php but alter it for your own needs

If you want to do it yourself there's a cracker on the Gentoo web site:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/virt-mail-howto.xml http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/mailfilter-guide.xml

We've adapted that a fair bit but essentially that's what we do.

For gmail see:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/qmail-howto.xml

Cheers, Laurie.