Keeping your mail server running may not be that exciting, but as soon as it stops, you'll know about it right away.
A mail server may not be the most glamorous bit of software you can imagine, but most users regard e-mail as one of the more important services provided by the Internet, if not the most important.
Very few businesses could effectively run in today's corporate environment without e-mail, in fact it's the preferred method of communication for many. An e-mail is timely, but unlike a telephone conversation you have those crucial few minutes or seconds to weigh and word your response; and can always come back to it in a few minutes if you're too busy.
It's interesting to note that e-mail servers were originally developed for mainframe Unix systems connected over the Internet (or its predecessors), and that e-mail started to take off over corporate workgroups in the early 90s.
When corporate e-mail systems were connected to the Internet in the mid-90s, the real explosion took place. You can be certain that no matter how high your e-mail volume is now, it will continue to increase at an alarming rate.
So when making your choice, look for some scalability in your software and the all-important hardware; in particular make sure you have room for growth in terms of storage space and that you have no nasty I/O bottlenecks.
Another area worth thinking about is the mail server's ability to scan e-mail for viruses and deal with annoying spam. These features are still in their relative infancy and many of the vendors currently provide solutions as plug-ins, although there are quite a few with native abilities in this regard.
Either way, it is certainly worth considering when you are about to make your mail server purchase.
The most common mail protocols are SMTP, POP3, MIME, and IMAP, and your mail server should be capable of all these. There are also emerging protocols such as ESMTP and APOP, and as security requirements grow, encryption protocols such as SSL and RSA are also becoming important.
Many controls have now been added to these e-mail server packages to stop spammers using your mail server to send out bulk e-mail and thereby wasting your operation's time, money (bandwidth), and resources.
As for incoming spam, there are several organisations to help with these issues. One of the primary ways of achieving this objective is to use a blacklist to effectively block the IP and/or Internet domain name that spam messages have been known to emanate from. One of the many blacklists can be found at www.arachnoid.com/lutusp/antispam/spamdomains.txt.
The use of these blocking lists must of course be balanced with allowing legitimate e-mail through. The blocking of legitimate e-mail can be just as damaging to your company as letting spam through.
Some blacklists are run by self-appointed crusaders against spam, who can be somewhat over zealous in blocking out mail servers. Major Australian ISPs have found themselves at the sharp end of these policies on several occasions.
The April 2002 issue of ZDNet Australia's Technology & Business Magazine contains reviews of mail server packages, including Editor's Choice Awards for the best products. For subscription information, visit Technology & Business.
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Tree years ago we were wondering which will be the best mail server to deploy in my office ( we are 25 users). The choice were between Xchg (altough we had a lot of troubles when our EXCHANGE Server bundled in MS Small bussines Server crashed and decided to quit Exchange also It was slow and the client was annoyingly slow)and Domino (my friends told me that Domino was rather complex an expensive to deploy).
My solaris trainer told me "Why don´t you use sendmail. It´s free and works fast"
One day I recieved RH6.2 and it took me 15 days to figure out how to deploy the mail service until I´ve found linuxconf :).
It´s been more than two years now, and the machine works very fast and very well . I used the CPU that nobody wanted (P133 48Mb 4Gb machine)
My experience is that those fifteen days spent in learning worth very well because we saved more than 15 thousand dollars. THNX Sendmail Linuxconf & RH!!!