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<TITLE>RE: LARGE scale email</TITLE>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>Phoenician wrote:</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>> </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>> Just out of curiosity, what would people recommend for large</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>> scale email? (what distro and application)</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>1,500 mailboxes, 350-400 domains. Okay, but can you be more specific on "large scale"? </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2> How many emails sent/received per day?</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2> How many MB?</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2> How much storage capacity per mailbox?</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>What distro's are you familiar with?</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>What Mail Transfer Agents (MTA's) are you familiar with? Postfix? qmail? Sendmail?</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>What Win32 MTA are you transferring from? Exchange?</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>Do you have calendaring concerns which need to be addressed?</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>Mailing lists?</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>What DNS servers are you familiar with? Bind? djbdns?</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>What do you currently use to filter spam?</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>There are a couple people on the list with significant experience managing large scale email concerns. I'm not one of them ;) But that doesn't stop most people from venturing their opinion... (at least I've qualified mine).</FONT></P>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>I'd say use look for the "hardened" version of whatever distributions you are most familiar with. Failing that, take a gander at <A HREF="http://www.bastille-linux.org/" TARGET="_blank">http://www.bastille-linux.org/</A>. Read the hardening documentation twice. When you decide to stray from the documentation, slap yourself with a clue-by-four. Then subscribe to a mailing list or visit a forum specifically targeted for your hardened distro, read their faq, and ask for advice there.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>On MTA's PostFix and qmail are both have a reputation for security. PostFix has a more active community. qmail is stuck in a minix like situation, where lots of people like and use it, but the author is so busy grinding his own personal copyright/licensing vendetta, that it's difficult for the community to support the code.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>Mailman seems to be the best supported mailing list manager...</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>Evolution can handle calendaring. If I read right, it doesn't require a dedicated server like Exchange does. SuSE was working on an Exchange replacement as well. Perhaps someone else will have suggestions?</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>djbdns is a nice small secure dns server. Same licensing issue as qmail. Other people may have other suggestions...</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>Hopefully, someone will chime in with a list of spam filtering techniques. Automatic whitelisting of email recipients combined with baysian filters seems to go a long way toward cutting out spam. I'll leave suggestions of actual applications to others.</FONT></P>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>--</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>Garrett Goebel</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>IS Development Specialist</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>ScriptPro Direct: 913.403.5261</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>5828 Reeds Road Main: 913.384.1008</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>Mission, KS 66202 Fax: 913.384.2180</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>www.scriptpro.com garrett at scriptpro dot com</FONT>
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