Chad Skinner said: > I am thinking about setting up a mail server at home as I may need to > learn to configure one for a small business. I have the O'reilly book on > managing IMAP and have been reading it (covers uw-imap and cyrus), but > would like others opinions, experiences, and advice before I choose a > solution. > > One of the primary things I would like to be able to do is have shared > folders. For example have all support related questions or listserv mail > placed into a common mailbox so the company's employees only have one copy > of each message. Also, I would like to store some of the authentication > information in an LDAP directory, but this is a secondary requirement. I > would also like the system to be easy to maintain / setup and modify > accounts, setup quotas, backup, etc. Have any of you setup a mail system > with similar requirements, if so what experiences/problems can you share, > and what server would you recommend.
last company I worked at I migrated them offa redhat 6.2/UW IMAP to debian 2.2/cyrus. Eventually(1 year later) I implimented LDAP authtentication and LDAP SMTP routing. debian only comes with cyrus 1.5 which is several years old. I'm sure redhat has something more current. But it worked well with shared folders(though not many people really used them). the imap server can keep track of read/unread for individual users, permissions etc, so you can have people able to read/copy mail on shared folders but not delete it. you can go further and have anonymous users able to access the folders(w/o authentication) as well. cyrus does support quotas, it's not the easiest to use(at least cyrus 1.5), not hard though, cyrus 1.5 has no quota notification, so I came up with a real ugly bash script which did it for me, I'm sure I could re do it now that I know some perl much cleaner now. Cyrus(and perhaps courier) do IMAP more properly then UW, so most email clients will suffer slight breakage when they first connect, most try to create/use a toplevel Trash and Sent folder, which is a no-no in Cyrus. All user folders must be below the level of INBOX. Another thing is some email clients have problems with shared folders, they have trouble seeing folders above the INBOX level. Either outlook or outlook express was real bad at it. It's not hard to work around on the server side, perhaps newer versions of the clients fixed the issue. authenticating offa LDAP is just a matter of using PAM. I can't imagine any IMAP servers not supporting PAM these days. I use cyrus on my home server as well. I got sick of having tons of email addresses going to 1 account, so each of my email addresses(like this one), gets dumped to a seperate inbox. But, accounts for these inboxes don't actually exist, nor do they need to. there is no 'redhat' user on my network, only a 'redhat' mailbox. The advantage of this, is mainly spam. Most spam I recieve is not addressed to any users on my system but instead goes through a list processor or perhaps is even BCC'd to me, so it makes it difficult to determine what address it was sent to. By having 1 address per inbox, its easy to determine. At the same time, I set the permissions for all the other inboxes so I have full read/write access to them under my main account. Authenticate once, and I have access to about 45 mailboxes. About 15 of which I don't care about, so I just unbsubscribe to them when I don't need them. email still flows in, but I just don't see it. cyrus 2 I hear has some fancy stuff like server side filtering, which cyrus 1.5 doesn't. Cyrus is also quite fast, it maintains indexes of the messages so when you login the system doesn't have to scan all the files(each message is in a file) to see what mail is there. Back when I was researching it a couple years ago one of the things that blew me away was the university that makes cyrus(I forget who, CMU ?) had on the cyrus page some stats, one of them was they were able to sustain more then 50,000 simultaneous IMAP connections to a single server! This server had quite a few raid arrays and stuff but still thats just amazing to me. It wasn't a very beefy server either, I think it was a dual or quad processor sun box. in any case, I do reccomend cyrus, its worked out great for me, no problems at all. I wrote up an extensive LDAP howto a while back, revised it last week, by putting it in Zope+Zwiki, so if you haven't learned about LDAP and are curious, I think my guide is one of the most complete available at the moment: http://howto.aphroland.de/HOWTO/LDAP my email systems also integrate squirrelmail for webmail, amavis for antivirus(Sophos/Mcafee as the scanners), Spamassassin, postfix, and sanitizer as well. I also have an old copy of squirrelmail lite which displays well on PDAs(160x160 resolution). Need to figure out virtual hosting with postfix/LDAP sometime soon .. nate -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?subject=unsubscribe https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list