need help setting up mail server can i have a list of software etc i need i need to set up emails 4everyone ie scott@{companyname].co.uk do i have to buy these email addresses etc some tips cause never set up email stuff before
Pretty much any major linux or xBSD distro will do what you're asking from a regular install. You'll have something like postfix or sendmail to handle the receiving of mail and then something like uw-imap will let you use outlook to access any configured user. If you want to be a little more adventurous you could go for a closed system like courier imap or DBMail [uses a sql database as it's backend]. The advantage here is that your users are all mail users only, they don't have a login account on the mail server itself. Alternatively you could go for a windows option like Exchange or Mercury Mail [freeware]. Also take a look at the following howto on configuring linux mail servers.
sendmail's a bitch to configure (it can be done, just... yeah, expect to spend 5 hours peering over 1 configuration text file I'd suggest a combination of qmail or postfix and webmin. I like qmail, since it was essentially set up for all I needed by changing one line of a text file (i need SMTP only) but the rest of the config looked really easy, so that's what i suggest. (naturally on some form of linux.... anything should do the trick, debian or gentoo would be easiest to manage.
No offense mate, but if you don't know anything about setting up mail servers, you should probably learn using some PCs at home before setting up something for a company. If you make a mess of it and leave their mail server as an open relay, their domain name could well end up being blacklisted, and that's real bad. As an overview, you need to: -Set up DNS servers using a service like www.nettica.com, or host your own. -Register a domain name, again using something like nettica or www.gandi.net. -Get an Internet connection with a static IP. If you're using it for commercial email, you'll probably also want something with a QoS statement from the ISP. -Set up a server - Windows 2000 Server, or pretty much any Linux distro will do nicely. -Install an SMTP server - personally, I like Exim because it's easier to understand than Sendmail. -Install a mail delivery server - Something like QPopper or CourierIMAP -Ensure the thing's secure and backed up regularly. This is not something that you can have up and running in 10 minutes. It's probably the hardest type of server to set up properly IMHO. BTW Jake, Courier is covered under the GPL, it's not closed. Cheers Buzzy
Closed in this sense doesn't mean closed source - if it had done I'd have said closed source. it means a closed system as opposed to a normal linux server running sendmail+procmail+pop3d where you need a unix login acct for every mail user systems like courier and dbmail can implement their own internal users and thus become a closed shop not requring system accounts on the host. This is much cleaner from a administrative point of view since you don't need to worry about someone being able to login to the host [although this shouldn't happen with proper security permissions anyhow] and potentially compromise the system. J
My mistake, sorry, I misunderstood what you meant - the version of Courier I use just uses standard linux user accounts and authentication because it's a load eas ier than running everything off a database I've yet to see someone actually use a setup which doesn't act like this, but then I don't spend that much time in the larger linux world
i would have to agree setting up and maintaing e-mail servers are by far the biggest pain in my experience sooo many damn options in the config files and then getting alll the differnet programs to talk to each other is endless hours of fun fun fun but may i suggest if you are running gentoo either of these guides which are useful Here Here
