Mail Server Setup in details

For deploying a consistent, efficient email server, pay heeds to the following considerations

Linux Distribution

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a Linux distribution produced by Red Hat and targeted toward the commercial market, including mainframes. Red Hat commits to supporting each version of RHEL for 7 years after its release.

  



CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by Red Hat.



Mail Delivery and Transfer

Postfix is an open source SMTP Server that is fast, easy to administer, flexible while at the same time being sendmail compatible enough to not upset existing users. Written by security expert Wietse Venema, it is built from the ground up to be secure.


Dovecot is an open source IMAP and POP3 server for Linux/UNIX-like systems. It complements Postfix with its high performance, ease of administration and rock solid security.

Web Mail Access



Apache is an open-source HTTP server supporting a wide range of operating systems including UNIX and Windows NT. Apache is a secure, efficient and extensible HTTP server that provides HTTP services in sync with the current HTTP standards.



Squirrelmail is an open source standards-based webmail package written in PHP.



Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus

MailScanner is an open source anti-virus and anti-spam filter for email servers. The anti-virus and anti-spam portion is delegated to third party applications.

ClamAV is an open source (GPL) anti-virus toolkit for UNIX, designed especially for e-mail scanning on mail gateways.


SpamAssassin is a mail filter, written in Perl, that identifies spam using a wide range of heuristic tests on mail headers and body text.





Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)

Fedora Directory Server is an enterprise-class Open Source LDAP server for Linux. It is full-featured, supports multi-master replication, and already handles many of the largest LDAP deployments in the world.



OpenLDAP is an open source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol.

JXplorer is a standards compliant general purpose open source ldap browser that can be used to read and search any ldap directory, or any X500 directory with an ldap interface.

Active Directory Integration

Samba is an Open Source/Free Software suite that provides seamless file and print services to SMB/CIFS clients.








System Administration


Webmin is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more.


For more: http://linux-circles.blogspot.com/2012/07/email-server-in-details.html