Which eMail Server to use?
 

I'd like to set up an eMail server on a Mac running OSX in a private school. It will have very minor requirements in the way of users - maybe 50, 100 accounts maximum.

We do NOT want relaying of any kind. In other words: You will have to be inside the building's intranet in order to send any email (to another user in the system or outside to the Internet) but you should be able to receive your eMail from anywhere (using your own ISP if you're at home, for example).

Most of all, we'd like simplicity. I had been considering AppleShareIP 6.3.x but have read about a problem where relaying can NOT be turned off. That's a killer problem.

Any advice (including links) will be appreciated.

Thanks,
Barry

Postfix

Besides it being a good mail transfer agent, an alternate good reason: Panther now ships with postfix rather than sendmail. So you'll be 'forwards compatible'.

You might also want to look into Communigate Pro. (http://www.stalker.com) Several ISP's use it and it runs on tons of platforms including OS X. That being said, it may be overkill as far as stability but the price scales depending on how many users you have so you get full quality code for less than a truckload.

My vote for email server on OS X is also Postfix, although the server I personally use is Qmail, vpopmail running on a Linux server. I have never tried it but I suspect it would run fine in OS X. May require a little more setup, but you get everything you could possibly want in an email server - pop, imap, virtual domains, webmail, mailing lists, etc.

My personal choice is exim, mainly because I'm a unix dummy and found exim the easiest to set up and configure.

Most every mainstream mail server has its fans. My suggestion would be to first find some documentation or discussion about installing and configuring the various servers (search the forums and follow the links), then choose the one that seems best to fit the way you think and the way you want to operate. I mutilated my system trying to work with several other servers before I found one that fit the way I wanted to do things.

I hate to be picky here, but aren't all your recommendations Mail Transfer Agents? MTA's send mail, they aren't mail servers, right? I mean, send mail isn't going to receive mail is it? Postfix doesn't give you a front-end to read mails on the web, does it?

I'm pretty new to the *nix side of things, but my impression is that there is a distinct and important difference between what constitutes a server and what constitutes a Mail Transfer Agent. Servers would be things like Communigate Pro and Eudora's Mail Server.

Not trying to troll here..

I thank everyone for replying to my request for assistance. I checked out Communigate and they have a free version that places a blurb about their product in each eMail. Big deal. For free, I can live with that.

Regards,
Barry

Is a MTA or Mail Server needed?
 

Oh wise ones, I have four OSX 10.2 Macs on a gigbit ethernet network accessing the web via a DrayTek broadband router. Currently only one Mac has an email account (using Mail.app). It receives all mail sent to anything@mydomain.com. I'd like to set the other three Macs up to access the same account but only retrieve mail sent to specific addresses at that domain, like help@mydomain.com.

Any hints would be very gratefully received.

Do a search for "Qmail Toaster" at google. It will show you how to build a complete solution using Qmail and vpopmail.

When I hear simplicity I think of EIMS. Unfortunately it's still in Beta for OS X.

http://www.eudora.co.nz/beta.html

It's been a very good tool for many people in OS 9.

They are indeed MTAs. They are also mail servers. (Using a very generic PostFix setup as an example) When you send mail through your mail client on your Mac, you're connecting to port 25 on the the host machine that has your mail server, and PostFix is listening for such a connection. It then attempts to contact the host that you're sending your mail to and communicates with it's mail server (MTA) to negotiate whether the user exists, they can accept mail, etc. The mail is transfered. If said user replies, the processes is reversed, and their mail server connects to your host machine, talks to your MTA (PostFix) and negotiates. Your mail is then stored in your mail spool and waits until you connect with your mail client to port 110 (assuming you're using POP3) which PostFix (properly configured to use POP3) will answer and then transfer the mail to your local machine.

We used to use AppleShare IP, until relaying became an issue, and had to stop (you cannot NOT be a relay with ASIP). We then switched to SIMS, which was free, and did IP based send checking (local network) and POP before SMTP.
After moving to the Xserve, we used Apple Mail Server, which does IP based checking (so it checked for our network IPs before it would send) and SMTP auth.
We have since moved to exim because my boss wanted a listserv, and none of the unix listservs would work with Apple Mail Server. At the time, I had a pre-alpha of Macjordomo for X (which would have done what we wanted, but crashed too much). We are using Apple's POP and IMAP services built into X Server, and using exim for the MTA.

Communigate pro is nice, but since we are a business, could not have the message at the bottom of our emails, and small enough that we could not afford to buy it.