[KLUG Members] A couple sendmail questions

[Adam Tauno Williams]

>>>When setting up a user for mail do you have to add an user to the os?
>>>It depends upon your mail server.  The default (and rather crappy, slow,
>>>and featureless) University of Washington IMAP server (often referred to as 
>>>UW IMAP)
>>does require a POSIX account as it supports no authentication/namespace
>>other than that of the standard UNIX process.
>Any recommendations which server?

For IMAP?  I *STRONGLY* recommend Cyrus.  We switched to it from UW primarily
for the shared folder support (access to mail folders is entirely based upon
user/administrator defined access lists).  What we got was that plus *SPEED* and
stability.  Occasionally UW would muck up an mail box,  Cyrus has yet to so much
as burp, and our mail traffic has almost doubled in the last year.  And fast? 
Holy cow.  It used to take almost three minutes to open my folder tree under UW
from evolution,  after moving the Cyrus it is so fast I can't even time it -
etner password and boom, it is ready to go.
ftp://ftp.kalamazoolinux.org/pub/pdf/Cyrus.pdf

For the MTA I don't think it matters so much;  sendmail, postfix, etc... so long
as it is something that is maintained.  I prefer to just stick with sendmail.

>>>If you do, and you have a mail server with multiple domains how does
>>>sendmail decipher which users are for what domain?
>>?  The address that was used to send the mail? :)  I'm certain I'm missing
>>what your asking.
>What I meant by this is if I have two domains (domain1.com and domain2.com)
>and a user (user1)  what is stopping me from sending email to
>user1@domain1.com and user1@domain2.com when I only want user1@domain1.com
>to work.  And what id I have two user1 usernames for each domain.
>After doing a little bit of reading I think this is all solved through
>aliases.  Correct?

You can do it via virtual hosting,  which is a bit like aliases.  We solved this
with LDAP mail routing - just create an inetlocalmailaddress in a user's object
for every address they should recieve mail at.

>>Is there any good software out there that can manage (Add and delete
>>users, etc...)a mail server?  Preferibly web based so there will be no need 
>>to actually login to the box.

If you use LDAP routing there are *LOTS* of tools.  But then of course you need
to install an LDAP server.

>>Again it depends upon your mail server.  Sendmail.Com sells a very nice
>>package for managing sendmail.  There are several admin utilities for Cyrus.  
>>For UW-IMAP your basically stuck with whatever POSIX user and quota management
>>utilites are installed.
>I plan to set this email server up for someone that has little to no
>knowledge of linux.  I would like to set it up and be done with it.  But it
>needs to be easy to maintian so one can add/delete users when needed.
>I am in a position to install whatever is best.  At this point I am just
>using what comes with RH8.0.  But I am very much interested in any feed
>back.

What comes with RH is UW.  Not something I would recommend for a "be done with
it scenario".