Sorry to bring this here, but we are having trouble setting up a Postfix/dovecot mail system.
Background: We are a bunch of retirees, so cost is a factor in any decision. We all have IT experience, some of going back decades, however the world of Linux and its software is new to us all. We used the cook book approach to setting up our first mail system. It uses Postfix/Dovecot on top of Fedora 8 and so far it works like a charm. While the cook-book approach got up and running fairly easily I think we missed out on the learning side of things. However, there is a growing concern about the basic OS slipping too far behind on important changes, the same goes for some of the packages we are planning on using, so we have started looking at alternatives. Fedora - a little too dynamic for use as a server. This is to be expected as it is a development system which I don't think is aimed at a production like environment, plus the latest release seems very desktop oriented. Centos 5.4 - while it looks like a good choice, there has been some political infighting going on recently which makes us a little nervous about its future. In addition we have found that a number of the core packages we wish to use are out of date (postfix, dovecot, amavisd-new among them). Ubuntu 9.10 Server edition - I am not sure what to say here. While at first glance it seems to be an ideal solution a, free server distribution with a Canonical backing it up. However, the setup of some packages seems to us "odd", overly complicated and arbitrary. openSUSE - not tied, but some concerns over the Novel /Microsoft deal. Thanks in advance John A