Mail Server Software Installation

Intro

With over 10 years experience in the management of mail servers, I have come across my share and decided to base my server recomendations with qmail based servers. I have found that qmail is robust enough to handle any situation, and flexible enough to allow filtering at various stages, making it ideal for most situations.

Outline

Using the customer's prefered OS It is possible to setup a server that can provide the following services: Also, it is possible to allow flexible filtering of messages with any combination of the following: Once the customer selects the Operating System, I require upto 5 days to do the following:
  1. Install OS from selected distribution
  2. Update necesary components
  3. Compile all software
  4. Test all components
  5. Physical Installation
After the server is operational, I give two (2) training sessions generally spanning 2-3 hours covering the following areas:
  1. Electronic Mail
  2. Server Operations

Details

Although the server software is qmail based, there are other software packages required to provide the necesary services. All are opensource software so as not to require additional licensing, but robust enough for production environments.

With the exception of the compiler, all the software components are compiled from source, optimized for the procesor and environment that the server will run under, thus optimizing all available resources.

Here is a list of packages used during installation:

Although these are the bases for the integration, there are several modifications that have been made to provide seemless integration, as well as propietary extensions that allow for additional services to be provided.

Hardware

This is probably the hardest part to get right, because it is all a balancing act with respect to the services required for the requested operation, and the traffic that is expected to be processed, as well as the amount of simultaneous clients that will be accessing the server.

In some situations only one server is required to perform all required and optional duties. In some cases where the number of users is small the server could be also used to serve the company's web site.

In other situations where redundancy is required, multiple servers may have to be configured to provide all the necesary services, or use multiple servers, each performing any number of the following tasks:

The design and separation of duties allows the customer to use one server initially, and deploy additional servers later. Because of this, the specific hardware requirements are difficult to determine, but for the case where one server will perform all the required tasks, the following specs are the minimum requirements:

CPU:Intel Pentium4 @1.8GHz
RAM:512MB (768MB+ Recomended)
Storage: 30GB (Depends on users/logging)
Network: 2 Physical Interfaces

These will handle 'light' traffic:

SMTP Msgs/min < 60
POP3 Sessions/min < 300
IMAP Sessions/min < 300
HTTP Requests/min < 120
Deliveries/min < 120

Processing more than these requests will require additional resources that will depend on the type of traffic that will be expected. Some require more CPU throughput, while others require additional RAM to process simultaneous requests.

Storage will depend entirely on the company's electronic mail policy, which should include the following:

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Updated: Sep 11, 2006