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

Reply via email to