LARGE scale email

[Garrett Goebel]

Phoenician wrote:
> 
> Just out of curiosity, what would people recommend for large
> scale email? (what distro and application)

1,500 mailboxes, 350-400 domains. Okay, but can you be more specific on
"large scale"?   
  How many emails sent/received per day?
  How many MB?
  How much storage capacity per mailbox?

What distro's are you familiar with?

What Mail Transfer Agents (MTA's) are you familiar with? Postfix? qmail?
Sendmail?

What Win32 MTA are you transferring from? Exchange?

Do you have calendaring concerns which need to be addressed?

Mailing lists?

What DNS servers are you familiar with? Bind? djbdns?

What do you currently use to filter spam?


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).


I'd say use look for the "hardened" version of whatever distributions you
are most familiar with. Failing that, take a gander at
http://www.bastille-linux.org/. 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.

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.

Mailman seems to be the best supported mailing list manager...

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?

djbdns is a nice small secure dns server. Same licensing issue as qmail.
Other people may have other suggestions...

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.



--
Garrett Goebel
IS Development Specialist

ScriptPro                   Direct: 913.403.5261
5828 Reeds Road               Main: 913.384.1008
Mission, KS 66202              Fax: 913.384.2180
www.scriptpro.com          garrett at scriptpro dot com
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