Some General Setup Issues

dagol · Posted: Mon Sep 13, 2004 11:59 pm Post subject: Some General Setup Issues

Hello everyone,

I've done some cursory searches, but not found too much what I'm looking for, so let me describe the situation:

Currently my laptop is my main machine. Runs winxp. I have my gentoo box, and my firewall (celeron, running IPcop)

I would like to have my gentoo box run an imap server, providing spam and antivirus filtering, plus my regular mail rules. So that all my messages are safely archived. (Currently I also store all my schoolwork, some music and video, and other important docs and files in my home directory on the gentoo box)

So I'd like to know how to setup courier-imap with a decent antivirus and bayesian spam filter. I know spamassassin is the big name, but I've heard less than stellar things about it's performance recently.

But I'll settle for any filter that will put messages in the folders SPAM, PROBABLY SPAM, and MAYBE SPAM. So that I can verify and retrain. I'd rather wade through a few messages than miss one legitimate message.

I don't need external access to my mail, but I do have a vpn with some friends (As we're all split at universities) and may wish to have their mail filtered and scrubbed here.

Now once, and only once, ouch, in the past I tried following the 'E-Mail solution for the home network' directions, and never, EVER got it anywhere near working. It was bad, very bad.

But I wanted to be clear, that I have no problem giving everyone (all 5 of us) who may ever use my server an account, vs the abovemnetioned guides' playing around with mysql and users that weren't really there. It was confusing, and I'd like to avoid it.

If the above isn't complicated enough, I'd like to get VPN set up, so that I (and my friends, if they were really bored, I guess) could have GUI access via my laptop(As I don't have a spare monitor, and ssh is fine for 'emerge -Dup world' but is rather limiting otherwise.)

So, about the whole mail thing... Help, please!

~ Dagol
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~ Dagol

fr0z · n00b Joined: 19 Jun 2004 Posts: 37 Location: Singapore

I would suggest Postfix with Courier-IMAP. There are some howtos out there that are easy to follow, and some are even Gentoo-specific! Those same howtos would also suggest SpamAssassin as the spam filter, although personally, I would go for Procmail + SpamBouncer [1] for this purpose. Easy to manage, very customisable, and IMHO less CPU loading.

[1] http://www.spambouncer.org

fr0z · n00b Joined: 19 Jun 2004 Posts: 37 Location: Singapore

Oops, missed the VPN part

OpenVPN [1] would suit your needs perfectly. Easy to setup and configure. As for GUI, the easy way out would be VNC, but it is a security risk and wouldn't be much use because it's slow. If you really want it, you could tunnel VNC over SSH.

AV software wise, I like ClamAV [2]. Works brilliantly with Postfix and SpamAssassin if you're going that route.

[1] http://openvpn.sourceforge.net/

[2] http://www.clamav.net/

dagol · Posted: Tue Sep 14, 2004 3:18 am Post subject:

froz, thanx!

We're currently using openVPN, and I think I'm going to leave it alone on the winxp laptop, until I have time to play with the VPN options in the IPcop firewall.

As for VNC I really only need GUI access to gentoo locally, (100MBit ethernet) so speed isn't really an issue (or are you referring to a different kind of speed?) and I'm sort of *blush* ignoring security for now, and hoping that the IPcop firewall keeps the bad stuff at bay.

So Postfix with Courier-IMAP, clamav, and spambouncer I will look into!

Again, Thank you!

~ Dagol
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~ Dagol