Setting up mail server

[TheRAt]

Hello

We are planning on upgrading our current aging e-mail system, and I am currently looking at alternatives.

The present system is run on a WinNT box. Our ISP collect all mail directed at our domain and this is stored in a mailbox we have with the ISP. MDaemon (WinNT mail server software) collects this and distributes to the different accounts we have in our domain.

We are looking to replace this with am Linux solution, and I am looking for advise on which direction to follow with this. What are people's experience out there with mail servers? What are the preferences? Any good documentation / information sites I can start with.

Thanks for any assistance.


AV
tnedor@yahoo.com

 

[zallen]

Sendmail and fetchmail should meet your needs. Try searching the website to find more information.


Hope this helps you!

 

[danns]

I'm running sendmail which does the job. You have to be on top of your security issues with Sendmail. I will say, it was a bit of a pain to get going, but it's working.

I have heard good things about qmail.

 

[GunJack]

I've heard a lot of people recommend Qmail over Sendmail but I've been running Sendmail on Linux for years with excellent results. The machine runs DNS, Pop, & Smtp for about 60 domains and I have practically 0 problems from it (knock on wood). Sendmail isn't simple to configure so plan to do some reading if you don't have someone who's been through it before.

 

[TheRAt]

Thanks for the advise. I am still a little unsure about what needs to be done to collect the mail for my domain from the POP3 mailbox that it is stored in at the ISP... Will sendmail / Qmail take care of this as well, or do I need to look at other software to do this?

Thanks again for all this info... I have lots of places to start from...

AV
tnedor@yahoo.com

 

[GunJack]

Sendmail won't retrieve the mail from the ISP but what you can do is re-direct mail to go to your sendmail machine instead of going to the ISP's mailbox. If there are reasons you need it to go to the ISP's address, then I don't think either Sendmail or Qmail will do what you want.

The question I would ask is where did the previous NT machine send the mail? Did your users login to it to get their mail or did it forward the mail to another mail server on your network? I would recommend setting up either Sendmail or Qmail and having the ISP send all mail directly to the Linux box. You could then have your users retrive their mail directly from the machine running Sendmail/Qmail. This would require you also run a pop3 server on the Linux box but that is a trivial component to install.

 

[PenguinMan]

Use Qmail and Vpopper

 

[david902]

Sendmail is just a transfer agent, three things it likes to do relay, forward, reject.


now on to my question, similar subject, part sendmail, part DNS.

I've build a name server ns1.wolpofflaw.net, a secondary name server ns2.wolpofflaw.net, for the most part everything is with DNS is working, ( i'll get back to this later,) anyway, we've just bought a new domain and want to set up email for employees under this domain, my bright idea was to use sendmail on the ns2.wolpofflaw.net server since it's a slave server. ( give it something else to do. )
now I need to make sendmail masquerade ( correct term?) as mail.platinumfinancialsvs.com or platinumfinancialsvs.com, so joe@platinumfinancialsvs.com can receive mail via outlook express via POP3, I installed the xinetd POP3 daemon, its working fine, I setup several accounts ie ns2.wolpofflaw.net and mail.platinumfinancialsvs.com in my outlook express. I have been sucessfull sending mail out from outlook express through the mail server via POP3 using both accounts, I have setup sucessfully to receive email at joe@ns2.wolpofflaw.net, but I can't get it to work as joe@platinumfinancialsvs.com

the error I get from my host is....
----- Transcript of session follows -----
451 4.0.0 MX list for platinumfinancialsvs.com. points back to ns2.wolpofflaw.net: No such file or directory
554 5.3.5 Local configuration error

which looks like DNS issues, I'm not sure my sendmail configuration is setup correct, the MX record for platinumfinancialsvs.com points to ns2.wolpofflaw.net

I've no idea how to proceed, thanks for your tips.

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

Presumably, its saying that the MX for that domain is pointing at ns2.wolpofflaw.net but it can't connect to a smtp server on port 25 at that latter address. Is that the correct address where sendmail is running ? It resolves to an IP address that can't be pinged from here - traceroute gets as far as a box on the same subnet (x.x.x.250) .

Regards

 

[david902]

yeesh! found a typo in my /etc/local-host-names
spelling the domain name right helps.
thnaks. life is up and running.