salamo 3lakom...

we are a company that currently running two MS Exchange mail servers :mad: located at two different location (site A and Site B) that are serving one email domain. i.e. xyz.com

and because we believe in Linux, we decided recently to study :confused: to build the same mail system under linux. i.e. site(A) will run server1 and site(B) will run server2. both servers will serve the same domain (xyz.com. only server1 must be connected to the internet. server2 will send and receive emails through server1.

i wonder if somebody can help with some docs or tips for the proposed mail configuration?:confused:


thanks a lot in advance for help :)

Ashraf

did you try the documentation at www.postfix.org??

Try qmail.
The fastest and most secure MTA.
It is the one used by yahoo.com

www.qmail.org
www.lifewithqmail.org (a tutorial).

Regards

hi eng ashraf how r u

if you want to configure a mial server in linux operating system
try to use sendmail
and this is small link to how use it
http://pinsa.escomposlinux.org/sromero/linux/sendmail.html

also you can see this site
http://www.arrayservices.com/projects/Exchange-HOWTO/html/book1.html
with my best wishes

postfix is good, i been using it for a couple of weeks without any problems.

peace

Go for exim.

I am recommending qmail from my experience with it.
You know, we handle thousands and thousands of emails daily on our servers, and sendmail was performing like an old man in the track.
qmail is performing excellent, and with no security problems.

Regards
Mohamed Eldesoky

Sendmail is better than qmail if you know how to configure it, and how to secure it. Sendmail is scalable and can handle much more than you can imagine. Just does not know how to optimize it and configure it does not mean it is act as an old man.

and sendmail is soooo full of security holes.
I say PostFix or Exim, but postfix works better in a distributed mail serving environment.

cheers,
Alaa

Being the most used MTA for more than 20 years doesnt mean it should be used all the time. He is really an old man in the track and should retire to give a chance to others.
security-wise Sendmail has a long history of security problems u can check a small list of them here http://search.cert.org/query.html?col=certadv&col=incnotes&col=trandedu&col=vulnotes&charset=iso-8859-1&ht=0&qp=&qt=sendmail&qs=&qc=&pw=100%25&ws=1&la=en&qm=0&st=1&nh=25&lk=1&rf=2&rq=0&si=1
and also dnt 4get to check the main site http://www.sendmail.org
I think for this only reason you should kick Sendmail
Also qmail till now has no ONE SECURITY AVDISORY at all during the past 3 or 5 years since it was released

Another important feature that Sendmail lacks is supporting the Maildir format. Qmail has both formats the Maildir and Mailbox

Design-wise Sendmail has only one application that does everything. For example in Qmail u can simply stop the SMTP daemon while leaving the local or remote deliveries untouched which u cannot do in Sendmail. Even u can inject new emails also while the SMTP daemon if off
Qmail has a new design technology that I think not existing in any MTA. It separates the process of email transfer into tiny small modules that do one job.
You have a module for smtp session setup, another for queueing the mails, another for sending or delivering them. You can check the Qmail big picture here http://www.lifewithqmail.org/ldap/#The%20Big%20Picture

Concerning speed and performance; from our own experiences with both; Qmail beatssssss Sendmail.
you can check those benchmarks too http://www.benchmarks.dmz.ro/article.php?story=2002081221400018 and http://benchmarks.dmz.ro/article.php?story=20020711175408345

Another important feature of Qmail only; clustering. Qmail has a built-in clustering capability and has its own SMTP transfer protocol between its nodes known as QMQP which supercedes the slow SMTP prorocol you can read about it here http://cr.yp.to/proto/qmqp.html

Finally you can consider Sendmail and Qmail like Windows and Linux

And this is the beauty of Linux, you will get hundreds of people with different solutions to your problem, and all insist that their solution in the best.
:)

However, regarding ditributed servers, qmail has another variant called qmail-ldap, that uses LDAP for authentication and other normal mail options. ( like .forward in sendmelt)
Also in the LDAP you can define which server the user will use and almost everything about the user.
This means you can just throw new servers in without much trouble, it will get all its information from the LDAP server.
Believe me, it is incredible

And don't forget the modularity of qmail where everything in done by small components that just interact with other components (that you can change if you like).

http://www.nrg4u.com/

Originally posted by sattia

Another important feature of Qmail only; clustering. Qmail has a built-in clustering capability and has its own SMTP transfer protocol between its nodes known as QMQP which supercedes the slow SMTP prorocol you can read about it here http://cr.yp.to/proto/qmqp.html


QMQP can greatly speed mail transfer between your internal servers, if you check the headers of any email sent from yahoo, you will notice that it has travelled via QMQP in the middle ;)

Regards

Finally you can consider Sendmail and Qmail like Windows and Linux

Disagree on this one.

and sendmail is soooo full of security holes.

Qmail and others are not used widely, yet they have good enough share but check mail servers on the net, mostly it is sendmail, so yes because they are there then ppl hit on it more.

Check the anoncements about the holes, and check the security fix release date, before it makes it out to public there is already a fix for it. So it is not like Microsoft in anyway.

Having alot of bugs meaning it has alot of activities and development. All the soultions discussed , LDAP, speeding up, queuing ...etc can be done with sendmail and can scale and be done if you know how to do it.

When we talk about yahoo.com mail servers, for sure it gives an illustration of how reliable is qmail.
And it is not widely used, because it is not bundled by default in Linux distros (due to some licensing problems), but it is widely used when it comes to reliability and large scale mail services.

Regarsd

I am not saying qmail is not stable or scalable .. I like qmail and think it is good one as well. I was only saying sendmail is not bad as one can think.

I vote for postfix. very modular, very flexible , and very powerful.

my vote is for sendmail, it is mature

cyberpop justify ur claim

Ashraf,

This commercial application is "Exchange like mail server" that have the option to support multi sites and multi domains, BTW the MTA building block is a Postfix mail server.

You should check that and consider it as alternative soultion to your MS Exchange.

You can download Bynari Insight Server for testings from http://www.bynari.net/

Alex.