Best email software to use if you are new to BSD?

P

porcelaindev

I'm setting up my first non-windows email server and wondering what software you use on yours?

We've been experimenting with dovecot, and are now looking at Postfix or sendmail. But is this the right choice of software?

Performance isn't really a massive issue as the server is pretty modern and we don't need to have many users (<30). More important to us is how quickly we can get it up and running (with very little unix experience).

Also feel free to post links to any good how-to guides you have found, I'm sure they would be of use to others as well as me. :stud

So far these are the best I've read:
http://www.aasimon.org/mailserver/
http://www.bsdguides.org/guides/freebsd/beginners/dynamic_web_email.php
http://www.freebsddiary.org/dovecot.php
http://wiki.dovecot.org/HowTo/DovecotLDAPostfixAdminMySQL
http://wiki.dovecot.org/QuestionsAndAnswers
Click to expand...
 
While sendmail is already included in the base system and very powerful, as a newbie you probably should install postfix when you want to setup the mailserver quickly.
As a mail (web)frontend I would recommend squirrelmail together with cyrus-imapd.
 
Postfix is already pre-installed and pre-configured for you in NetBSD so that might be something you should consider.
OpenBSD just like FreeBSD is shipped with pre-configured sendmail due to the license issues.
Linux people for the most part in my experience prefer Exim which is part of default installation of many major Linux distros. Debian for instance.

Edit: OpenBSD is shipped with OpenSMTPD for the past several years.
 
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Postfix for the MTA,
PostfixAdmin as the web interface if you wish to use virtual,
Amavisd-new for antispam and antivirus (clamav,spamassassin,razor,pyzor,dcc),
Dovecot for IMAP(s)/POP(s).

You can play around with these applications and included bonuses like VDA patch for Postfix - quotas, Sieve for Dovecot and so on. Of course, this is just one of many paths...
 
While sendmail is already included in the base system and very powerful, as a newbie you probably should install postfix when you want to setup the mailserver quickly.
Click to expand...

I would recommend this not only for newbies, but for experts too.
Sendmail is hard to understand and configure, which means it's easy to make a mistake and hard to solve problems, which means more time needs to be spent, which means more money ect.
 
Carpetsmoker said:
I would recommend this not only for newbies, but for experts too.
Sendmail is hard to understand and configure, which means it's easy to make a mistake and hard to solve problems, which means more time needs to be spent, which means more money ect.
Click to expand...

Now that makes two of us.
I would recommend Postfix to both newbies and experts without a second thought.
 
dgnr8 said:
If you want a failsafe shot of getting it up and running the following link is just what you are looking for.
http://freebsd.qmailrocks.org/

Step by step with all the packages you will need, warning though it will take you a while to do it.

for your webmail client I strongly recommend

http://atmail.com/

You will not be disapointed
Click to expand...

I thought that Qmail was not maintain for a while. If I remember correctly Qmail is one of the worst documented peaces of software. Do not get me wrong. I am a big fan of DJB and in particularly his DNS server but Qmail for a complete n00b is kind a iffy. Speaking of DJB I really wished he released that software with BSD license instead of killing it by being overly controlling. Just my $0.02.

Since we are suggesting here more radical solution how about
OpenSMTPD of OpenBSD project.

http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20081203183856

It is still not production quality but hell probably in year or two will be the best mail server around.
 
Didn't djb release all of his software in to the public domain some time ago?

In any case, I am not a big fan of the so called `djbware', it appears that he did most of his coding late 1990's/early 2000's and after that moved on to other interests, which is fine, except that after he moved on he left most of his software with a very odd license (basically, It's free, but patches have to be approved by djb), meaning that very few (none?) patches went into the official package, and you will have to get patches and hacks from the net/google/whatever.

That just sucks.

Now that QMail is public domain, I hope some people step up and start actively developing QMail (Or rather a fork).
I am not a particular fan of sendmail, but for these reasons I would sooner use sendmail then qmail, at least sendmail is maintained, bugs are solved, there is some documentation, qmail may be fundamentally better, but that's useless if there are bugs floating around and little to no support.
The same also applies to djbdns, I prefer using bind.
 
Carpetsmoker said:
Didn't djb release all of his software in to the public domain some time ago?

In any case, I am not a big fan of the so called `djbware', it appears that he did most of his coding late 1990's/early 2000's and after that moved on to other interests, which is fine, except that after he moved on he left most of his software with a very odd license (basically, It's free, but patches have to be approved by djb), meaning that very few (none?) patches went into the official package, and you will have to get patches and hacks from the net/google/whatever.

That just sucks.

Now that QMail is public domain, I hope some people step up and start actively developing QMail (Or rather a fork).
I am not a particular fan of sendmail, but for these reasons I would sooner use sendmail then qmail, at least sendmail is maintained, bugs are solved, there is some documentation, qmail may be fundamentally better, but that's useless if there are bugs floating around and little to no support.
The same also applies to djbdns, I prefer using bind.
Click to expand...

QMail is in public domain but not all of djbware necessary for it is in public domain. In any case would you like to edit the code of the guy who sued the U.S. goverment went on trials for couple of years and won. I didn't think so.

I think you gave a very accurate description of whole deal with his software.

Speaking of sendmail it is rewritten from scratch as we speak. So something might come out of it as well.
 
Try postfix, you have tons of documentation, it is really secure + stable and the configuration is straight forward. I configured a postfix server 2 years ago, and till now it is still working without any crashes.

I also have an old qmail server but believe me u don't wanna go there: it is like an old lady, always nagging about something, and alot of maintainance for it.

From my point of view go with postfix
 
Carpetsmoker said:
Sendmail is hard to understand and configure, which means it's easy to make a mistake and hard to solve problems, which means more time needs to be spent, which means more money ect.
Click to expand...

Basic sendmail configuration really is not very hard at all any more -- you could run it out of the box or just add some access rules. (In the olden days of hand-editing .cf files it was quite different!)

However, if you do want to integrate plug-ins (milters) it can indeed get much more fiddly.
 
tomh009 said:
However, if you do want to integrate plug-ins (milters) it can indeed get much more fiddly.
Click to expand...

Code: 
#  ClamAV milter
INPUT_MAIL_FILTER(`clmilter',`S=local:/var/run/clamav/clmilter.sock,F=, T=S:4m;R:4m')
define(`confINPUT_MAIL_FILTERS', `clmilter')

# milter-regex milter
INPUT_MAIL_FILTER(`milter-regex',`S=unix:/var/run/milter-regex/sock, T=S:30s;R:2m')

Seems trivial to me?
 
Another vote for postfix, postfixadmin, amavisd-new, dovecot from me.

I was a mail server admin noob too. But the default postfix config is almost usable. Setting up SASL with dovecot was easy, as everything is well documented either on dovecot.org or postfix.org. Not to mention the tons of docs all over the net.
 
I'm pretty new to advanced mail stuff as well, however I've been running a simple sendmail installation for years. So I'll add my questions if you don't mind. :)

What do you guys think about dbmail? Or is dovecot better? Generally that seems to be the opinion.

What about exim on freebsd? I'm in a process of setting up a new mail server (to replace simple sendmail installation I mentioned before), and from reading guides, docs, and message boards, exim seemed to be a good choice?
 
I'd get the latest revision of the Exim book...
the one with Chapter 20 relevant to smart-host AFAIK.
..............
the freebsd-questions list has had *long* threads answering
your question.
 
If you are referring to my question.. I probably am not that good at searching things in freebsd-questions archive, but search query "dbmail dovecot" didn't returned anything relevant, and "exim and postfix" unfortunately didn't either.

I don't see anything wrong to ask for you guyses opinion on dbmail or dovecot. And out of curiosity about exim subject as well. So answers on this topic would be greatly appreciated, as is your comment.

cheers :)
 
If I recall, the author of Exim has a recent version of
his textbook about it. (To which I referred.). Exim
is on my "eventual todo" list probably because of that
book. I've seen the first version.
to search the freebsd-questions archive,
(probably from freebsd.org also) I usually go to
groups.google.com, enter "lucky freebsd-questions digest"
, and select the lucky.freebsd-questions.digest (maybe not
its actual name ) from the search results. Then one
can search the digests for threads.
 
Dovecot + Postfix - just can recommend them specially since Postfix can use Dovecot's Auth so you don't need to rely on SASL.

Both work fine with various Backends and Frontends - Squirrelmail or what you or your users prefer.
 
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