If you already have an LDAP directory such as Novell NetWare or Microsoft Active Directory, feel free to use that. LDAP is a good way to offer a corporate address book because of its ease of supporting many different clients. The last requirement is a directory service. A self-signed certificate may be sufficient for internal use, or see for a free digital certificate. Because some common PHP misconfigurations can pose a security risk, be sure to read the documentation. Our choice for this was SquirrelMail, a PHP-based interface. Web-based e-mail is a nice feature to offer. Otherwise, a Samba share on the Linux server will work just as well. If your organization still has a Windows or Novell server around, use a directory there. This is easily configured on each individual Outlook client to store schedule data on any shared directory instead of on an Exchange server, and it makes the Free/Busy information available to others. Because we were using Outlook, we took advantage of its Internet Free/Busy feature on the clients. One drawback to IMAP is that it doesn’t natively support calendaring. We also recommend configuring IMAP to run encrypted via SSL. We prefer this to POP3 because mail remains on the server. It also has helpful built-in features such as MIME filtering and is capable of checking addresses against public spam lists.Īt the desktop, we reconfigured Outlook’s connection type to IMAP. ![]() It’s robust and generally easier for a novice to configure than Sendmail, especially in its plain-English rule configuration. ![]() For the underlying MTA (mail transfer agent), we used Postfix. We’re partial to Fedora Core 3, but just about any distribution should work. Although these specs may seem unimpressive, this setup provided adequate power to handle our 500-user load except under extreme circumstances.Īfter you have your hardware in place, select your favorite Linux distribution. Going that route means giving up having a single vendor to turn to for support and a nicely packaged installation, but it could save a boatload in licensing fees.įor hardware, we chose a used but still healthy Pentium III 1.7GHz server with 1GB RAM, equipped with two 36GB SCSI disk drives - typical of a “leftover” common to thousands of datacenters. After reviewing commercial Linux messaging servers, we wanted to assess the practicality of building a similarly capable e-mail solution made entirely of open source tools.
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