ISPmail tutorial for Lenny is online

My new ISPmail tutorial for Lenny is out. Yay! For those who don't know what I'm talking about: I've been maintaining a tutorial for configuring a Debian-server as a full-fledged email server (Postfix/Dovecot/Amavis/MySQL: POP3, IMAP, SMTP, spam fighting, virus scanning, webmail, MySQL backend) since the days of Debian Woody that has a growing fan base. Some of the new features are a simpler database schema, server-side Sieve filters, an introduction to logical volume management, quotas, SPF and DNS handling. And as usual it's not just copy/paste style but spiced up with lots of explanations on the basics that a sysadmin needs to know to run an email server. There are also hints for readers of the previous Etch tutorial on how to migrate. A few pages of additional (non-essential) features will be delivered in addition soon (Backup MX with MySQL replication, mailing lists, DynDNS, policyd etc.).

Comments

In Lenny there are some other

In Lenny there are some other new SPF checking packages too. I maintain (and am upstream for) postfix-policyd-spf-python and postfix-policyd-spf-perl.

The -python package is (in my obviously biased opinion) a more complete and better policy server to recommend for SPF checking than tumgreyspf (it is a fork that is specific to just checking SPF and not doing both SPF checking and greylisting).

It has a number of additional features, including the ability to whitelist some domains from SPF checks, the ability to whitelist forwarders from SPF checks, and a lot more control over receiver policy.

great thanks for your work

great
thanks for your work :-)

Thank you for the great

Thank you for the great tutorial.
Works like a breeze :)

Florian

@ScottK: Thanks for the info.

@ScottK: Thanks for the info. I intended to switch to postfix-policyd anyway and just started with tumgreyspf because I have it running on my servers. I'll try your suggestion and likely update the tutorial.

Congratulations with this

Congratulations with this fine document!

Would it be possible to use a lighter sql server, like sqlite? I'd like to play around with this on the sheevaplug, but it seems it would take too much juice. I could be wrong. 2nd question. why have you chosen apache for webserving? one would think that a lighter/more efficient webserver would be better with many users. could you briefly share your thoughts on this?

All the best from Venezuela

@Thaiz: Thanks for the

@Thaiz: Thanks for the comment.

sqlite: While sqlite may be an acceptable choice on small mail servers it's not appropriate for larger environments. Foreign keys, performance, replication, concurrent accesses. These are issues that sqlite doesn't handle well. I love sqlite for a quick setup to test a web application but once it goes live I favor PostgreSQL. (I'm mainly using MySQL in the tutorial because I believe that more sysadmins are familiar with it.)

Apache: The reason was that Squirrelmail comes with an Apache configuration file which made things easy. I personally favor nginx for the simpler needs - haven't tried it with PHP though. I'm aware that Apache is a beast. Suggestions welcome. :)

Personally I'm very happy

Personally I'm very happy with prayer (in the debian repos). I have not used squirrelmail enough to compare them, but comming from Horde, prayer seems unreasonably simple and fast. There definitely is a noticeable difference on the 1.6ghz singel core atom cpu. btw. their online "demo" does not do the project justice.

Maybe someone reading this likes it too. It does however require you to install a seperate webserver if you want phpmyadmin and other webhosting, so it might not be so attractive to all.

Great! Its one of the best

Great! Its one of the best howtos you can find on the internet.