Re: email questions

From: Matthew Schumacher <schu@schu.net>
Date: Fri Jul 01 2005 - 09:33:21 AKDT

bob@estimations wrote:
> I'm toying with the idea of setting up an email server for a small business
> (about 10 employees). Email is currently being provided by a remote
> webhost. The webhost has
>
> I have a number of questions I'm hoping I can get some feedback on.
>
> First of all, should I do it? What are the risks and/or rewards? I'm
> thinking that the primary risk is that I don't know what I'm doing, so may
> leave some security holes open in the installation, and that it might be a
> hassle to maintain. But I'm thinking that the primary reward is that I can
> more easily filter incoming mail, intercept spam at the server, etc.
>
> Secondly, if I *do* try it, what is a good package? I've been looking at
> qmail, and even found a couple of installation howto's that look like
> something I could do. e.g.
>
> http://www.flounder.net/qmail/qmail-howto.html
> http://www.qmailrocks.org/
>
> Does anyone have experience with qmail and/or others that they may like
> better? Also, any recommendations on spam killer applications?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Bob Crosby
>

There are several advantages to having your own mail system:

1. You can setup filters any way you want and you only worry about your
own user base. Don't need email outside the country? Reject it. Don't
want to allow zip files that are password protected? Drop them. The
sky is the limits. I manage a bunch of mail systems, and the large ones
get more spam simply because I can't ban away.

2. You configure your own message size limits, message quotas, etc.
Your not stuck with someone else's solution.

As far as how hard is it to setup, depends on what your doing, and what
package you go with.

I personally stick with sendmail/mimedefang because you have completely
control of very aspect of the filtering process. Want to reject mail
sent to a specific address, but only if the user didn't authenticate, or
if the message length is more than 10k, no problem, 5 lines of perl and
it's done.

I personally don't care for qmail because the default install doesn't
filter mail until after it has been accepted. In order to fix this you
need to use the qmail-queue patch which passes the message to another
program during the smtp connection. While this works fine, it can cause
a pretty large performance hit if the filter isn't real efficient or
daemonized. The sendmail solution talks to its filters via tcp/local
sockets so you can run the filter on another host if you want, and it's
always in memory ready to go.

Most find qmail much easier to setup, but I'm not sure it's any easier
by the time you get all of the patchs and programs working together.

Now as far as Tim's comments with exchange, yes you can go that route,
but you won't get anywhere close to the filtering ability unless you
purchase filtering software such as GFI which is pretty expensive.
Don't forget that you will be kicking it a couple of times a month to
patch it, and backups can be very difficult and complex.

Far and wide Microsoft software is easy to setup and get running, but
when you start thinking about moving stuff to different hosts, backups,
restoring data that has complex dependencies, ssl certs, etc, it starts
getting every bit as complex as any unix solution.

In short, I think having your own mail server is a good idea, but by the
time you get it all working and filtering the way you want it,
regardless of platform, you going to have some learning curve, however I
think it is well worth it.

schu

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Received on Fri Jul 1 09:33:18 2005

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