Email server tutorial

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Fri, 10 Jul 2009, John Hansen wrote:

> I'm looking to rebuild our current email server and was wondering if anyone
> has a good tutorial on how to do that, especially with the configurations. I'm
> looking at using the following on 8.04 LTS.
> Postfix, Dovecot, LDAP, Amavisd-new, Spamassassin, ClamAV, Grey listing, and
> OpenWebmail.

As someone who runs several, do you have a really good reason to run an
in-house mail server?  If so, fair enough.  

If not, I'd be looking at getting someone to take the workload off you.
Gmail is an obvious free service (who will remove adverts for educational
customers) but there are lots of other services (some cheap if not free)
available too.

I'm curious to know what the compelling reasons are to go to the trouble of
self-hosting and not use a service like Gmail.  To have someone else
provide an excellent webmail system with pretty good spam filtering that's
also available over pop3/imap from anywhere, provide large storage,
excellent integrated calendaring with Email/SMS notifications, very high
uptime and reliability all for free.  It seems you'll create a lot of work
for yourself trying to make a poor-man's version of it.  Economies of scale
are pretty enormous in this industry.

I guess the big scarey word "privacy" is likely to come up.  Is that the
only reason?  To what degree is this really a concern?

We're all geeks and like to run things ourselves and be in control of
systems, but we also owe it to our employers to allocate our available
scarce resources as best we can.

I'm not saying this is necessarily the answer for you, but I'm curious to
hear people's thoughts.

Gavin