[clue-tech] Mail server questions

[Matt Gushee]

Jed S. Baer wrote:

>> 2) I'm planning to use Postfix for SMTP, but am not sure about
>>      POP/IMAP. Recommendations?
> 
> FWIW, Dovecot as an IMAP server seems pretty easy to setup for IMAPS, if
> you're wanting encrypted transport. If not, it does POP3 too, and allows
> for various methods of authentication and encryption for both POP and
> IMAP.

Cool. I was aware of Dovecot, and thought it was a good candidate.
> 
> On the CLUE server, we use Postfix rules to weed out a lot of spam with
> SMTP rejects, which is better than spending the bandwidth to receive it
> and send it to /dev/null.

Ahh, me like. Though I will need to learn how to do this. Do the Postfix 
docs adequately explain how to write these rules? Or, if not, do you 
know a good 3rd-party tutorial?

> When I was working on getting Dovecot and Spamassassin set up for CLUE, I
> tested using a 2nd box on my home network. A VM would work for that as
> well.

Oh, duh! Well, almost duh ... because I'm already setting up a FreeBSD 
test machine in VirtualBox--yeah, my server's running FreeBSD 7.2. Sorry 
it's not Linux, but BSD was cheaper, and 'they' say it's more secure :-)

But let's see--how would I set up the hostnames? Is it good enough to 
just tweak /etc/hosts, or do I need to run a local DNS server for the 
test network to work right?

-- 
Matt Gushee