I would recommend FreeBSD + Qmail as MTA. My company runs an e-mail outsourcing business and this combination has done wonders for us.
-George On 5/12/2005 12:54 PM, Ben Wylie wrote: > Currently I am running my mailserver on a windows box. > would like to migrate my mailserver onto this linux box so that > hopefully I will be able to get a faster, more stable system. > Is there a standard combination programs used as a mailserver as I hope? No. The UNIX model is historically based on writing smallish tools (I said historically) that are called upon for specific tasks. What this has produced is what you are running into: there are options for just about every function in a complex system, but its really up to you to figure out which features you want and what components provide them. For a mail system, you need to pick a transfer agent (SMTP server), a delivery store, and the retrieval agents (pop and IMAP servers), along with whatever glue components you might also need to tie these together. The granddaddy MTA is sendmail, but there are lots of others to choose from, including postfix, qmail, exim and more. For POP/IMAP, there is Cyrus, UW imapd, Courier and others. If you need to do some kind of message filtering, you might want to use hooks provided by the MTA itself (as with sendmail's milter interface, and postfix filters), or you might want to use filters that manipulate messages in the delivery store (as with procmail). If you need to get something up and running rights now, your best would probably be starting with commercial package like Communigate Pro (http://www.stalker.com/content/solutions.htm) that offers all of the functions, but is also extensible, and then test with other technologies on a different box when you aren't under pressure to make something work. If you're just looking to kick some tires, it is pretty easy to get UW imapd working (it sits on top of existing *NIX mail spool directoriess), and postfix is an easy MTA to configure. You can play with calling in stuff like procmail or postfix filters pretty easy from there.
