[geeks] Help Please, Email server question.

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Wednesday, September 4, 2002 at 00:51:07 (-0700), Geoff Reed wrote: ]
> Subject: [geeks] Help Please, Email server question.
>
> Ok, I am thinking of putting a machine up on my net as an incoming and 
> outgoing email server, I can throw exchange2000 server on a spare Win2K box 
> and apply all the security patches and then only let the pop3 and smtp 
> ports be opened from the firewall, or I can use one of my sparcs, what MTA, 
> IMAP, Etc do y'all reccomend for a low-volume mail system?

I personally would recommend smail-3 for the MTA.  It's basically
designed specifically for your situation and should drop in and work
efficiently and securely with only a very few simple configuration
statements.  I'm hoping to release 3.2.0.115 soon (I'm just polishing
off a full RFC 2822 header address parser library to be used in an
accompanying piece of software).

Postfix is also a very good MTA.  Exim too.

For IMAP I'd highly recommend Cyrus IMAP, version 2.x if possible as it
has the sieve filtering stuff built in.  It's a bit more overkill than
you need, but is much higher quality code and far more robust than any
other IMAP server I've ever even heard of.  Getting the SASL and TLS
stuff working for secure remote access is a bit of a pain, but if you
use some base OS that has all these things supported in their native
third-party packaging then you should be OK (eg. NetBSD on your sparc
with pkgsrc to build and install this add-on stuff).

Stay away from imap-uw -- it's so badly written that more major security
flaws are a certainty.

I don't know a lot about Courier-IMAP, but it is popular and seems to
have suffered fewer vulnerabilities.  It's biggest drawback, from my
point of view, is that it requires mail be delivered in Maildir format,
so that rather restricts your choice of MTA (though to good enough ones).

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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