[GLLUG] Setting up an email server

Clay Dowling clay at lazarusid.com
Wed Feb 25 08:35:59 EST 2004


Seth Bembeneck said:

> When I went to use the pop account in Outlook it gave me an error saying
> that the Maildir does not exist.
>
> When I looked in the home directory for the user, .maildir does not
> exist. And no mail was going out from the server
>
> How do I get one there?

There should be a program "maildirmake" that came with Postfix.  That's
the program that comes with Exim, anyway.  Run that for each user and
you'll get the necessary directory structure.  It's not as simple as
creating a .maildir folder though; there are folders under that that need
specific permissions.

> I have ssmtp 2.48 and mailbase 0.00-r5 installed.
>
> Do they both have to go?

It's a bad idea to have multiple MTAs running on a server.  Multiple MUAs
is also inconvenient, but MTAs are bound to conflict.  Now I can't be sure
that ssmtp and mailbase aren't part of postfix, so make sure about that,
but if they aren't make them go away.

> If I decide to do this on a separate computer, how can I get my
> webserver computer to send mail?

Your web server will install with sendmail at a minimum.  It's a perfectly
suitable MTA, especially for a server that won't be supporting a large
number of users.

> Which is better, qmail or postfix? Or any other? Which is a good one to
> use, but still easy to set up?

I've been using an Exim/Courier combination for a year or two now, and I'm
very happy with it.  That's the same combination that the new MSU mail
servers are using, which is why I used it.  It was fairly easy to set up. 
That said, I've never heard anything against postfix, so I should think
that it would be easy to use.

Clay

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