[plug] Mail and IMAP server questions.

[Christian]

Michael Hunt wrote:
> 
> What preference do people have for different MTA's (i.e. sendmail, qmail
> etc.) I am wanting to do a home mail server and In the past have used a pop
> server by the name of Post Office (from software.com) that is very easy to
> work with. It is NT based so I was looking fro some opinions on sendmail
> (the art of black magic ???) configuration in comparison to qmail. My
> finding so far are that sendmail configuration looks quite involved and that
> it is not highly regarded as secure, easy to use or fast (well that was
> going by the opinion of the Mail Howto). However the default config with
> RedHat 6.0 just needed some minor changes to suit my situation to get it
> running. Some opinions on  qmail would be interesting in this instance
> (distro war now becomes which MTA is better. While we are on the subject
> maybe some opinions on editors !!!)

Qmail's design is certainly a lot more secure than sendmail's and I
believe it's performance is also significantly better but this is all
second-hand opinion since I've never played with it myself.  I also
understand there is some extra setup work involved since it keeps mail
spool files in users home directories.

Another MTA you might want to consider is smail.  It's small, quite
light-weight, very easy to configure and largely compatible with
sendmail.  I also don't think there have been any security issues with
it EVER which there have been with the other two.  I'm not sure how
suitable it is for large volume sites (although it's probably not that
bad since it's the default Debian MTA) and it's certainly not as
flexible/powerful as sendmail but if you're doing this for a home mail
server then it's probably very worth a look.

> Secondly does anyone have some doco/info/tips/steps to setting up IMAP on
> the above box. I checked that the entries in /etc/services existed (they
> did) and that the comments in front imap and pop where removed from
> /etc/inentd.conf. A restart and I could telnet to the port and connect with
> Outlook and also create folders but I can't delete them. (Error message
> about some process already having them in use). Have I made some errors in
> my config ?? Any help/pointers would be appreciated.

I've never had any problem with IMAP although I use Netscape as the
client so my guess would be that it's some miscommunication between
Outlook and the IMAP server.  I also run it on a Debian system so
alternatively it could be a minor fault/quirk in Red Hat's config.

Regards,

Christian.

-- 
========================================================================
I'm not trying to give users what they want, I'm trying to give them
freedom, which they can then accept or reject. If people don't want
freedom, they may be out of luck with me, but I won't allow them to 
define for me what is right, what is worth spending my life for.
                                                    - Richard Stallman