webmin can handle the management of some mail servers; you can see the full list of standard modules at
http://webmin.com/standard.html
and that's where I'd recommend reading up on this stuff.
In general, for FreeBSD installations, what I've done is install FreeBSD and any ports I want on a new machine, and then I'll copy the configuration files. You can, of course, install from a disk image, but I can generally install a new bare FreeBSD box in about ten minutes from CD, and then bring it up to -STABLE, install whatever ports I need and copy and customize configuration files. If I'm doing that sort of thing a lot, I'll write a script to automate as much as I can. It's not too much trouble to do, and the nice thing is that you can get it working well even on dissimilar hardware (whereas a custom distro occasionally produces problems).
On a side note, lately, I've been keeping all my configuration files in a
git repository that's set up as a mirror, and using Makefiles from that repository to install configuration files in the correct place. (My
git repository mirrors the directory structure, so I have an
etc directory, a
usr/local/etc directory, and so on.) The nice thing about this is that I can keep all my configuration files for all my systems in a convenient place, easily compare them, and so on.
Your mileage may vary, of course—there's no one best way to do any of this, and your particular needs are going to dictate the precise solution. But in general, FreeBSD tends to be optimized for management via source code (hence updating to -STABLE by compiling system source, installing software via port compilation from the original sources, and so on); if you're coming from the Linux world, you're probably more used to installing binary packages, but most of us find that using the source code provides more flexibility. That may take some getting used to.
In any case, welcome.
