Searching for a Solaris Mail Server?

pipeb0mb asks: "The company I work for is looking to update our mail server. Currently, the hardware is a Sun Enterprise 450. It was to be used with iPlanet 5.01 (the bastard child of iPlanet, Sun 'SIMS' and Netscape Messaging Server). Unfortunately, iPlanet just will not run...to be more precise, it won't even INSTALL! iPlanet support is less than stellar. In the wake of this discovery, the mail service being utilized is SIMS 3.5 on a 250. However, it is old, and we are beyond capacity on users (we're up to 8000). To make it even more complicated, we need some additional features for our server?" The additional feature list isn't all that long, and it's fairly reasonble. Hit the link to check it out and feel free to offer suggestions, as always.

"Here's what our server needs to support:

• http interface (for webmail)
• IMAP
• POP3
• SMTP
• Relay filtering, both on the user level and the server level
• content filtering (optional)
• Web based management

and, most important of all

• multiple domain ready.

Again, it must be a Solaris compatible...be it 2.6 or 8, preferably 8. So Slashdot, whaddya think? Any ideas?"

Comments

Oops, scratch that -- with you being an ISP....

[scotpurl]

Now that I see your responses to other posts here, I don't think you have need for much of what I'm pitching. ISPs have decidedly different needs than businesses.

I think the first step is to break your systems up a bit. A small-ish Linux box accepts deliveries from the world, and filters incoming (which can even be two boxes, with the second box doing virus filtering). Another small-ish Linux box makes outgoing deliveries. One mega-server is your IMAP server, and handles POP, and actually has the mail files on it. Another server is the web interface, and does all the CGI stuff, and makes the IMAP connections back to your mail server.

I think the real solution here is to break up your tasks. Handling everything on one box is troublesome. If it's multiple boxes, you can actually swap something out for maintenance if you need to.

Qmail

[davidu]

Enter the hell that is qmail. It will solve all your problems but you can never go back, especially when you start bowing to the code god that is Dan Bernstein.

On a serious note, qmail can do everything you want coupled with the courier IMAP server. It is *very* advanced. Don't listen to the naysayers in this crowd about it not being GPL. It is not GPL, it is not BSD, it is not "licensed" even. Just use it because it is the best and it gets the job done.

Re:Why ?

[pipeb0mb]

The FM was R several dozen times...iPlanet was INSTALLED several dozen times ( i am not exaggerating. we were on the phone with those guys for hours at a time, doing it over and over).
About three hours after I submitted this 'ask slashdot', we hit a breakthrough. Turns out that our error, which occcured when installing the IDA portion, was based on a configuration anomoly in resolv.conf.
(iPlanet support said that this would actually be added to the preinstall readme file. Nice. )We added two lines, changed one more, and BAM.
It's Working.
However, during the 6 weeks we had this problem, we learned about several interesting alternatives, and we are not totally adverse to changing, given the delay and support nightmare we just experienced.

Elbow Grease vs. $$$

[memfrob]

I've gone through this situation in several discussions for mid- and large-scale operations. Your answer will somewhat depend on how much money, time, and work you want to put into this system, with the usual tradeoff of ( more dollars ) = ( less ( time + effort ) ).

For a free solution, I've found that a sendmail-based solution works quite nicely on Solaris. We ran some internal mailservers with a combination of sendmail for smtp, qpopper for pop3, apache and php for web access, and ActiveState PerlMx for mail filtering. There are many passable imapd programs that would fulfill your IMAP requirement, among other things, cyrus imapd

Don't be fooled, though; this took some elbow grease, and a little tweaking with sendmail and qpopper (mostly for the remote-administration bit; you don't want all of your customers in /etc/passwd on your server!)

If you'd prefer to just lay down a little cash to get a working solution out the door, Openwave has a very reasonable email platform or two. It seems like it supports everything you're looking for, above.

Also, don't forget that Sendmail, Inc. creates some very sophisticated sendmail-based products; it looks like Advanced Message Server may have all of the solutions you're looking for.