Qmail V1.03
Qmail evolved from the long-running Unix standard Sendmail. Qmail's author Dan Bernstein decided that some Sendmail features were unnecessary and complicated.
The idea was to make a mail server that could be understood and configured by mortals. In some ways it succeeded, in others it fell quite short.
We feel the author applied the razor a little too liberally to some of Sendmail's more useful features such as relay controls and forwarding. At least the cost of Qmail is very price competitive--it's free.
We installed Qmail under Slackware. If you are comfortable finding your way around Windows, but are not familiar with Linux/Unix then our advice is forget it! Unless you have some Unix background, the command-line interface (CLI) and esoteric Unix commands will have your head spinning in no time.
Installation is where Qmail really falls down. The Windows-based mail servers run rings around it, and even Sendmail under Linux installs much less painfully.
Some of the installation instructions for Qmail have even seasoned Unix users running a decryption algorithm through their heads to try and make sense of them.
Obviously configuring filters is not as simple as clicking on a couple of buttons. You must use the CLI to pass commands and their parameters to the program as it starts, or make edits to numerous configuration files.
It's quite obvious that only your network administrator and some of their support staff will be configuring and adding new users for example; it's not a task just anyone can carry out.
Given its small size--216kb in TAR format and 1.1MB in Red Hat RPM format--and extremely efficient code, it's certainly going to handle far more users and traffic than Windows-based software.
For example, the author claims Qmail can cope with dozens of simultaneous deliveries on an old 16MB 486. So what can Qmail cope with? There are plenty of examples of large entities relying on the package, such as Ohio State University, PayPal, and Hotmail (outgoing e-mail). An e-mail outsourcing service called Critical Path runs 15 million mailboxes using Qmail.
Another advantage of a Unix-based mail server is that the operating system is robust and was designed from the ground up to be a network operating system.
As a consequence, you can just about leave the server up forever and don't have to worry about such problems as memory leaks. Qmail will not run on Windows--I can hear quite a few murmured "so whats"--but it will run on just about every flavour of Linux/Unix under the sun.
OK, so what do we do about the missing bits or features? Being open source means that if users had a strong enough hankering for the feature, they generally wrote it themselves.
Being the sharing people that Linux users are, they would then post it up for the world to access for free. In this was you can get additional functionality such as the rather necessary (in our opinion) mail relaying controls and forwarding, as well as other niceties like POP3-based authentication CRAM-MD5.
If you're lucky enough to own a Cray, there are even patches to run Qmail on UNICOS. And, as far as e-mail virus checking goes, we found two products: Qmail-Scanner (aka scan4virus) and AmaViS. These can be had for the princely sum of the couple of cents it costs you for your ISP access to download them.
The distribution version of Qmail supports the basic protocols such as SMTP and POP3, but the Qmail-LDAP patch adds a great deal of functionality including security features such as SHA, MD5, MD4, RIPE-MD160, SSL encryption, and support for OpenLDAP, Mozilla Directory SDK, and Novel NDS.
Users access e-mail through any POP3/SMTP-compliant client. Web access is not a standard feature, but is available as a third party plug-in.
Unlike Imail, it does not feature calendar functionality. Support for the product is a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand it is free, but searching for answers or sifting through replies from Linux gurus can be a bit confusing for the uninitiated.
To be fair, if you post a question and point out that you do not have an IQ above 160, most of the replies will be in a more down-to-earth and easy-to-follow format (if a little condescending).
On the other hand, commercial support can be found in quite a large number of consulting firms you can easily find on the Web. Of course the quality of service will depend on which provider you select.
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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!!!