hi all, i need to install a mailserver on a Red Hat 8.0. I am a beginner in the linux world and dont know much, so please let me know which mailserver is easy to use and install. Some people told me that installing webmin is the best choice! What do you think ? Thanks, Sonu [edited by - Sonu Kapoor on December 9, 2002 9:11:03 AM]

Webmin is a nice program, but its not a mail server, its a web based administration tool. If you want a mail server I''d say go with qmail.

I would recommend you look at sendmail, postfix and qmail.

www.sendmail.org(use this site, the official site is www.sendmail.com, but this one is a great resource)
www.postfix.org
www.qmail.org

each of these works, are fairly easy to configure and has their pluses/minuses. Each of these seem to have religious level followers so I would just recommend you read about each on your own and figure out which one works for you.

Dan

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety
deserve neither liberty nor safety.
-- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

quote: Original post by dpffc8
I would recommend you look at sendmail, postfix and qmail.

www.sendmail.org(use this site, the official site is www.sendmail.com, but this one is a great resource)
www.postfix.org
www.qmail.org

each of these works, are fairly easy to configure and has their pluses/minuses. Each of these seem to have religious level followers so I would just recommend you read about each on your own and figure out which one works for you.

Dan

I''ve used sendmail and postfix some, and qmail fairly extensively.

While I agree about each having their religious zealots, Sendmail has in my experience been quite hard to configure, and often appears on the bugtraq security lists.

Postfix and Qmail on the other hand have had very few (if any) known security vulnerabilities.

From an administrative perspective, Qmail seems to work very well and is very modular. On the flip side, it is written and maintained by one person who has somewhat unconventional ideas about configuration and operation. Not to say that it''s bad, but it can be unusual. I believe the correct term would be that it''s not exactly POSIX compliant.

I can''t comment on Postfix that much, it is more POSIX-ly correct (than Qmail) from what I understand.

-- Aaron


| HollowWorks.com | Rhott.com |

Thanks all for the replies!

Now please can somebody tell me, how a mailserver works ?? I think this is the basic before starting to configure anything.

Can somebody explain it to me step by step ? Like what happend exactly in the behind, if i press the "send/receive" button of my outlook ??

Thanks, Sonu

http://rfc.sunsite.dk/

look for rfc2822
also might look at 722(these are long and painful, but very informative)

The basic idea is like this, when you hit send for an email message your client software(such as outlook) will take your setting for the smtp server, attempt to contact that server(smtp server) and initiate a transaction with the mail server in which the mail server will take that message and send it out to another mail server(the destination for your email), that email server will take the message in and store it somewhere.

When you go to download your mail, you will contact your mailserver(pop3/imap server) and make a request to get all those messages from wherever your mail happens to be stored.