setting up email - advice appreciated

[httpwebwitch]

I'm setting up email on this thing now.

I'll be creating many inboxes for multiple domains, eg:

[e-mail]
[e-mail]
[e-mail]

[e-mail]
[e-mail]
[e-mail]
[e-mail]

[e-mail]
[e-mail]
[e-mail]
[e-mail]

I started this odyssey with sendmail. What a mess! I couldn't make heads nor tails of it. but then a Linux guru buddy suggested postfix, saying it was much easier & simpler to configure. So I'm going to try postfix instead.

Many of the howto's say that to configure a new account, I need to create a Linux user, like:
#> useradd webmaster

implying that there will be piles of "home" folders:
/home/webmaster/mail
/home/user1/mail
/home/user2/mail

I don't want to do that.


On my current host (using CPANEL), the mail accounts are all in one user /home/ area, organized like this:

/home/my_name/mail/example1.com/
/home/my_name/mail/example1.com/webmaster/
/home/my_name/mail/example1.com/user1/
/home/my_name/mail/example1.com/user2/
/home/my_name/mail/example1.com/user3/

and inside each user directory, I see ./cur, ./new, ./tmp, ./.Drafts, ./.Sent, ./.Trash, etc.

I like that.


How do I set up postfix (or ... something!) so email is organized simply, and easy to configure (I add and remove new mailboxes fairly often)?

Later I'll want to POP and IMAP into this thing from Windows

[caribguy]

I set up a combo of qmail with vpopmail, courier-imap and clamav about 1 1/2 year ago and lost almost a week of my life messing with it. It now works perfectly, buy yeah... I do feel your pain!

For an interface to add users, domains, resize mailboxes, etc you could try qmailadmin.

[httpwebwitch]

The adventure continues... the ideal solution is a combo of postfix & dovecot. I can add clamav and spamassassin later, too.

postfix supports "virtual aliases" so I don't need to create Linux users for each mailbox; and according to the documentation it should be so easy I could do it while I'm asleep. or drunk.

Reality isn't quite like that. I've been fiddling with mail for 6 nights now, and messing with virtual aliases for 3 of those.

so far i've been able to receive messages via POP, but only to one domain & one inbox. No sending yet.

[lammert]

Setting up mail on Linux systems can be a mess, because you have different packages for different tasks.

Postfix is good for sending/receiving emails and storing them in a central repository, while Dovecot is optimized to distribute these stored emails to the end users over POP3 or IMAP connections.

I have not much experience with Postfix-Dovecot, more with Qmail-Dovecot, but if possible you should try to configure Postfix to store the messages in a MailDir structure. Dovecot can parse the MailDir message structure very efficiently.