Email Server with Linux and Qmail

December 17, 2007 | By admin In Linux, Web Hosting, email |

Web hosting preview for email solution
Email services in todays ICT world is one of must have for every company regardless of small, medium or enterprise the company is.

Linux and open source software is one of the best option in term of software costing, stability and reliability. Mail transfer agent (MTA) like Qmail, Sendmail, Posfix or Exim is among the popular one and I prefer to use qmail to powered my email servers.

Why qmail?
Qmail is a sendmail replacement and is among the five most popular Unix mail servers on the Internet.

As the nature of open source, email server solution come with another handy software packages to complement with the qmail and it’s free of charge.

Qmail Ingredient
The installation and setup of a qmail based mail server requires list of softwares to work together and once again I remind you, all of the software listed below is free from software licensing fees.

1. Supported Operating System
Currently qmail work fine on some flavors of Unix and Linux which are :

Centos 4.x & 5.x
Redhat Linux/RHEL / Fedora
FreeBSD 4.x & 5.x
Debian 3.0
Slackware 9.1/10
Solaris 9

For me, my qmail machine normally powered by Centos.

2. Qmail with added patches
This is a qmail core software. The creator of qmail, Dan Bernstein design the qmail for high security and aim to be a sendmail replacement.

Latest distribution of qmail is netqmail-1.06 . It is comprised of previous qmail-1.03 distribution plus the recommended patches and some documentation.

3. SMTP and POP3 server
This is the standard service protocol supported by qmail. Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) is a standard mail protocol used to download email messages on your local computer whereas SMTP is Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and it is standard protocol for sending emails across the Internet.

4. Start up scripts & daemon tools
Start up scripts and daemon tools is a small set of very useful utilities, from Dan Bernstein. They are mainly used for controlling processes, start/stop service daemons and maintaining log files on qmail server.

5. ucspi-tcp & ucspi-ssl
ucspi-tcp & ucspi-ssl is a set of command-line tools for building TCP-based client/server applications.

6. vpopmail
Vpopmail a free GPL software package, to provide an easy way to manage virtual email domains and non /etc/passwd email accounts on your qmail mail servers. It can support multiple virtual email domains in a single qmail server.

7. autoresponder
Autoresponder does exactly what you think it does. It allows us to set up autoresponders for mailboxes.

8. Mailing list manager (ezmlm)
Ezmlm is a software package for managing electronic mailing lists created by Dan Bernstein. ezmlm is an easy-to-use, high-speed mailing list manager for qmail.

9. QmailAdmin web tool for users

Qmailadmin is a web base interface to lets you manage all your POP3’s, forwards, aliases, mailing lists, and autoresponders in your virtual domain. It lets you do this all from one control panel. It makes things really simple for you to use. It also gives you the power to have total control over all the e-mail sent to your domain and how e-mail accounts are setup.

10. vqadmin web for system admins
vqadmin is a web based control panel that allows system administrators to perform actions which require root access. Through the interface we can create new domains, new users, email quota quotas, enable services and much more.

11. Qmail Mrtg Statistic
qmailmrtg7 is a free tool to help monitoring the activity of processes. qmailmrtg7 takes the pop3, smtp and qmail transaction logs and sends them to a different mrtg graphs.

12. Webmail using SquirrelMail

SquirrelMail is a web-based email application written in the PHP scripting language. It’s web base email client to read or access email from pop3 email account.

13. IMAP server
IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. It is a method of accessing electronic mail that are kept on a (possibly shared) mail server. Courier-imap is the preferred IMAP server and it’s works with Vpopmail and virtual domains

14. OpenEFilter - AntiVirus and Spam Filtering
OpenEFilter is a complete email content filter, virus scanner, and spam blocker for qmail. Is’t a group of open source email scanning products such as spamassassin , qmailscanner, clam anti virus etc

Qmail vs M$ Exchange
Converting to an open source software solution is not only a way to save money, but also supports the global development of free and open source software solutions. After all, software is a tool — not a commodity.