From sendmail to...?

Wilderness Child · Posted: Sat Jan 29, 2005 10:05 pm Post subject: From sendmail to...?

The situation is as follows. We have a server with around 200 users with SSH access, webhosting, and also a mail service. The current server runs Red Hat with sendmail, and mboxes in /var/spool/mail. Also, some users have .forward and other procmail stuff.

Now we're upgrading the server, and the mail service with it. We intend to convert all mbox files to maildirs, but keep them in /var so they don't count in users' quota. /var is a ReiserFS partition, so we don't expect any problems with many files (some users' mailboxes are several 100 MBs). Of course, .forward files and other processing things that I'm not even aware of need to keep working.

As sendmail does not support maildirs, and it's said to be a mess anyway, we are forced to choose another MTA than we are currently running.
Qmail is said to be easy to configure; however, it is no longer actively maintained, and its feature set is minimal.
Exim strikes me as too immature, from what I've read.
So the initial choice was postfix. However, it supports maildirs only in the homedirectories of the users, and after a lot of protests we decided that was not the way to go.
Right now I'm looking into Courier. I like that it is an all-in-one package, including IMAP, POP and webmail. Unfortunately, it does not seem to be well documented, and some consider it immature as well.

Please note that I do not have any first-hand experience with any of these programs. That's why I'm asking here for your opinion on which mailserver is best for this situation.

scithe · n00b Joined: 12 Jan 2005 Posts: 34

I don't know if courier is the right software in your situation, but i have to mention that i set it up with a friend a few days ago. It is simple, if you read the man pages. Every other docs just make things complicated.
We were foced to set it up on a debian system... I tell ya, that was hell of a trip X(

Wilderness Child · Posted: Sun Jan 30, 2005 12:34 am Post subject:

If anyone can tell me more about the stability, speed, reliability and overall maturity of Courier, I'd be a happy man

Wilderness Child · Posted: Mon Jan 31, 2005 2:38 pm Post subject:

Anyone?

deboeck · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 13 Jan 2004 Posts: 92

Hi,

I'm running qmail as mail server and Courier for IMAP. I'm quite happy with them. Of course, our server only has about 25 users, so the load isn't that high.
The consensus on qmail, however, is that it's fast, reliable and stable. It is indeed not being actively maintained but then again, I don't think anyone has ever found a bug in it

What kind of features are you looking for that are not available in qmail ?

Steven

Syntaxis · Guru Joined: 28 Apr 2002 Posts: 511 Location: London, UK

deboeck · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 13 Jan 2004 Posts: 92

Wilderness Child · Posted: Mon Jan 31, 2005 11:09 pm Post subject:

Actually, postfix can deliver to maildirs in /var, through procmail. We decided to stick with this configuration.

Thanks for your input everybody!