Open Source Tools Part 1 - email

Today's post is a follow up to last week's blog listing some fo the open-source tools we use here at Infotegrity. I will discuss how we use these tools for our corporate email solution.

We followed the Qmailrocks installation for the most part. We started with qmail for the MTA along with some patches for extended capabilities. While we do not have a very heavy workload, qmail has proven to be extremely reliable and has not stressed the server one bit.

Vpopmail and qmailadmin from Inter 7 are used for email domain and account management. They are easy tools to install and use, and allow our users some control over their mailboxes for forwarding and vacation messages as well as other adminstrative functions. Another administrative tool used is vqadmin, also from Inter 7, which adds additional domain and account controls. Vqadmin allows us to control what each account has access to, set user quotas and manage domain and site level parameters.

To allow employees acces to their email from anywhere, we installed Courier-IMAP/IMAPS and SquirrelMail. Courier-IMAP was fairly easy to set up with SSL and with courierpassd allows users to change their own email passwords from within SquirrelMail. SquirrelMail is a php based webmail application. It is quick and has some great plugins available to extend its core capabilities.

As everyone knows, the biggest challenges facing email administrators today are viruses and spam. We have employed several tools to fight the battle, but it is an uphill battle. ClamAV is used for anti-virus on the server and has become the standard on our desktops as well when the current anti-virus software expires. The virus database is updated daily and periodic scans help keep the system and emails clean. SpamAssassin does a pretty good job tagging and filtering most of our spam, but we are looking at other tools to aid in the fight. Both tools integrate into qmail via Qmail-Scanner which is a substitute queuing mechanism and allows other tools to be executed in the queuing process.

There is very little maintenance required with this installation, and using the Qmailrocks instructions made it fairly easy. This set-up allows to handle multiple mail domains and allows for us to even host mail service for others in the future. I would love to hear any comments or suggestions about what you are doing for your email solution.