[Techtalk] Mailserver - which one to install?

Mary mary-linuxchix at puzzling.org
Thu Oct 10 21:49:02 EST 2002


On Thu, Oct 10, 2002, Gina Lanik wrote:
> Which mail-server would you recomment? I've seen packages (this will
> be on a Debian system) like cyrus, teapop, qpopper, etc. but
> absolutely have -no- idea which one to install/test. This mail-server
> should serve my domain and in the future my SO's, so no
> high-volume-corporate traffic to be expected. What are the advantages,
> pitfalls, etc. with above mentioned?

OK, there are two things you will probably need:

1. A Mail Transfer Agent (MTA), which handles incoming and outgoing
email from the machine. It is the program that will accept mail for you
from the outside world. It will place it in a file on the server for
you.

The Big Four of MTAs are: sendmail, qmail, exim and postfix.

Sendmail has a reputation for being very hard to configure. I have
configured qmail and found it relatively good to configure and the
documentation adequate. I have heard complaints though. Postfix has
quite a good reputation. Perhaps others will speak up.

2. A POP or IMAP program. This is a program running on the server you
connect to to download your mail to your home machine. (Note that you
could log into the server and use a text-based mail client like pine or
mutt to read your mail instead, if you like text-based mail clients and
have a fast connection.)

Fetchmail talks to both POP and IMAP servers, but if you like graphical
mail clients, many of them, including Evolution, KMail, Mozilla Mail and
Windows mail clients like Outlook and Eudora can all talk directly to
IMAP and POP servers without the need for an intermediate program like
fetchmail.

IMAP is a protocol designed to let you store your mail on the server and
*copy* it to your home machine, and supports things like keeping mail in
different folders on the server. POP doesn't support multiple folders,
and is really designed to let you download your mail and delete it from
the server (although that is a subset of IMAP's functions too). If you
don't want to keep mail on the server, POP should be adequate.

I don't have any experience setting up IMAP or POP programs, do people
have recommendations?

-Mary



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