Versatile but reasonably simple virtual mail solution?

[elkaran]

Howdy,

I recently set up a gentoo server to connect my home lan to the internet. Now I'd like to put an email system in place, but I'm a bit overwhelmed with all the different available options.
I have several needs, I'd like to host mail for my domain, have imap & webmail access and also perform user-specific filtering on the machine (with the ability to configure the filters from webmail). The whole thing should use virtual accounts, as I don't have any real login accounts. Additionally, I would like to fetch remote mail over pop3 and "insert" it into the local system before filtering takes place.

As imap server I guess courier-imap would be fine, squirrelmail looks good for webmail. However, I'm a bit unsure what MTA (is this the correct term?) to take, qmail, postfix or whatever.

I found plenty of different howtos, but I'm really a bit lost in all the options. Can someone point me to a good starting point or give some recommandations on how to set up all this stuff?

I guess the howto here on gentoo would be a starting point, but I'm unsure where to put in in filtering there (and what kind of filtering software).

Thanks.
elkaran

[guero61]

I use postfix, as it was what was in the Gentoo docs, and it has worked wonderfully for me.

Others really like qmail and sendmail; they're more full-featured and such, but qmail by far more than sendmail.

If I had the time and patience to figure out qmail on my own, I'd do it. Otherwise, I'm sticking with postfix.

Not sure what to do about fetching remote pop3; might try fetchmail. Then again, postfix may do it and I just don't know it.

[caffiend]

Postfix is an MTA and is unlikely to retrieve mail. You would need something like fetchmail to get it from the remote server and that would then deliver it to your local MTA.

I use Exim in a virtual hosting situation with courier-imap and am pretty happy with that.

www.exim.org