Linux mailserver

[stockhausen]

I am looking for a way to run a central email repositry under Linux so that I can back up emails easily, reliably and regularly. I am not really interested in Calendaring, Meeting invites, etc. I don't want to use Exchange - I want a low-cost Linux alternative.

What currently happens is that people (about five) connect to our ISP and download emails to their (local) Outlook.pst file. They don't bother to backup their .PST files.

I would like to set up a Linux server that would collect emails from our ISP and then allow individual users to open them (in Outlook) whilst leaving the original on the mailserver. We often get attachments with the emails (Word documents, Powerpoint presentations, spreadsheets and .PDFs). The emails are as often in HTML format as not.

Any suggestions?

 

[M0KUJ1N]

In a word, IMAP

 

[matja]

At work we've been using courier-imap IMAP server and Exim (SMTP server), using Windows 2003 active directory for authentication and message routing (forwarding, mailing lists, that kinda jazz), for the last 3-4 years at work (30-40 users) and it has worked flawlessly. We used MySQL as the account backend for a while (which worked great) but wasn't so useful when people forgot their mail passwords.

IMAP allows multiple concurrent sessions to each mailbox (IE, logins from multiple clients/locations) by storing all the messages on the server, and using the local client to maintain a cache (for performance... optional).

Having all the mail data in one place simplifies your backup strategy immensly and also provides an open route for high-availability solutions like shared-storage for clustering.

Mailboxes total about 50GB and it all runs on a measly pentium 3 server, but its still snappy performance-wise. Backups are simple - the backups server does a incremental rsync-over-ssh every night, copying only the messages that have changed. Using hard-links in backups means you can get cheap point-in-time snapshot-style backups, spanning months/years without eating excessive ammounts of storage.

If you would prefer to use your ISP as your inbound SMTP server, then you could still run a local mail server, and perhaps use somthing like fetchmail to periodically retrieve the messages and place them in the desired mailbox.

 

[AndrewP]

As above, IMAP will store the mail on your Linux server and the user's Outlook clients will point to there.

Hardware wise any reasonably recent machine will do, 5 users is a negligible load, though you will obviously need enough disk space to store the emails.

Software wise you'll need an OS, mail transfer agent, IMAP server and some content filtering wouldn't hurt. Examples would be any distribution (I like CentOS), postfix, sendmail or exim, courier or dovecot and finally MailScanner with SpamAssassin + anti-virus.

This is a pretty common use for Linux servers, there should be a decent howto online for whatever combination you fancy .

 

[ChrisB]

I use imap mainly, qmail, spamassassin and clamav on Cent-Os.
Oh and sendmail to a limited degree.
All nice and free

 

[feenster99]

Something like eBox might be suitable? Would add many more features besides if you want to expand its use.