[ILUG] Tip - Web frontend for managing mail accounts

[NW Dublin]

Having just set vexim up on a debian box in the last month I can 
absolutely attest to it's lovelyness :-)   If your wondering about what 
email server for a debian box make sure you check this first!

The only thing I have left to do is hook-up mailman (didn't bother 
initially)!

Niall

John Allman wrote:

> For a long, long time now i've been looking to replace our out of date 
> mail server with something newer and shinier and easier to maintain. 
> And for me, ease of maintenance is synonymous with debian. But, qmail 
> isn't in apt (thanks djb for your lovely licence) and if i have a 
> debian box, there's no bloody way i'm manually keeping any software 
> up-to-date on it. No problem you say - there are a lot of arguably 
> better mta's that conveniently *are* in apt.
>
> But. In order to replace our current server i would also have to 
> continue providing everything it did. And on our old server we had 
> qmailadmin and vpopmail which made handling email accounts dead easy, 
> and more importantly, an administrative task not neccessarily done by 
> me. So in our new mail server we needed something similar. We needed a 
> mail server which could be managed via the web and protected against 
> spam. I also wanted to switch from courier-imap to dovecot, partly 
> because i keep hearing great things about it and i wanted to give it a 
> try and partly because unlike courier-imap it does not use INBOX as a 
> namespace and you dont have to make all your mail folders 
> subdirectories of your inbox.
>
> Enter vexim (http://silverwraith.com/vexim/). Now vexim doesn't claim 
> to support dovecot, but it does have the option of using postgres as a 
> database. So i figured (correctly) that getting it working wouldn't be 
> too hard. I highly recommend this to anyone on the list. It's pretty 
> and it does what it says on the tin perfectly. I now have a mail 
> system with everything i wanted and then some. I now have an 
> honest-to-god virus scanner working at smtp time (clamav). I can now 
> manage which accounts should and should not be scanned for viruses and 
> spam. I can choose on a per-account basis the spam score at which 
> mails get flagged as spam and at what score they just get rejected. 
> And there's more. If you're interested - go have a look!
>
> For anyone trying to do what i did, i posted to the vexim list 
> (http://keylime.silverwraith.com/pipermail/vexim/2004-July/002480.html) 
> with some helpful pointers. It wont get you all the way there, but 
> it'll get you close. If anyone tries it and gets stuck, feel free to 
> send me a mail off-list.
>
> Anyway - i just thought i'd share it with you as it's a bloody handy 
> little tool.
>
> John