setup mail server

Ed Holden eholden at mclean.harvard.edu
Thu May 6 13:39:43 UTC 2004


I should warn you that I've had some issues with the Dovecot POP/IMAP 
server.  It's a nice daemon: very easy and simple to configure because 
it's just one System-V daemon with one config file.  And it was 
apparently faster at IMAP than the xinetd-based Cyrus imapd that comes 
with Fedora (and has come with Red Hat Linux for a while) because it 
uses creates index files for all your IMAP folders.

Unfortunately I found that (a) it crashed regularly, and (b) it got 
confused with my POP3 mail users who had their clients configured to 
leave messages on the server, causing them to download ALL of their old 
messages.  This latter problem is probably not a bug, but a difference 
in the way Dovecot and my old POP daemon, Qpopper, dealt with cached POP 
mail.

Point is, Dovecot crashed on me a few times.  I'm sure it will develop 
into a great mail daemon (the philosopy behind it s design is spot on), 
and perhaps the problem with it was Red Hat's specific build and not the 
software itself (a lot of people seem to love it).  But I ended up 
switching back to using Qpopper, though I'm sure that ipop3d would have 
been fine.

-Ed


Pedro Fernandes Macedo wrote:
> Jeremy Brown wrote:
> 
>> Sendmail handles SMTP, and Fedora includes a generic IMAP server as 
>> well (I don't remember who makes it...dove something, I think).
> 
> 
> dovecot... Good software.. Has support for IMAP , IMAPS and POP3... I 
> dont remmember the standard config that comes with Fedora , but I 
> believe it comes with everything disabled , so it's pretty useless if 
> you just start the service without configuring it properly.
> 
>> There should be almost zero configuration for IMAPd.  Install it ("yum 
>> install imapd"), enable it at boot time (with "ntsysv", for example), 
>> and your users should be able to log in.  Easy as pie.
> 
> 
> It depends.. Dovecot has a lot of configuration , but the config file 
> has lots of comments and examples.
> One thing I'd like to point to Nina... I worked as a sysadmin and when I 
> first tried to learn sendmail , it worked , but not perfectly... If you 
> get too tired of trying to understand sendmail , you can try postfix.. 
> It has a good security record (3 serious bugs so far , against about 48 
> in sendmail , according to cvre.org) and it's configuration is simple 
> and very commented. Also , the postfix.org website has a huge 
> documentation and lots of howtos about lots of different configurations 
> (from simple configurations to vhosts using databases...)
> 
> -- 
> Pedro Macedo
> 
> 


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