For several years I have made it a point to build and maintain my own Linux based Mail Servers for my personal email domains. At one point in my career I was even building and implementing these Linux mail servers for business customers who wanted to have more control over their company email accounts without paying a provider to manage and host them all. This was prior to the “Cloud” revolution in online services and free email accounts with huge amounts of storage. However it was also toward the beginning of high-speed, dedicated internet connections which meant companies who didn’t have a ton of email traffic to/from their server could affordably bring their mail server in house.
Most of those customers have since moved back to outsourcing their email to a cloud host. However I still like hosting my own email server (I too have moved this from in-house to a data center based server) and continue to keep a Mail Server How-To guide going based on the software and configuration I use. I am currently set to upgrade the mail server to the latest and greatest software. My intention was to use CentOS 7 or CentOS 8, and so far these are the base operating systems I’ve used in my testing. However I am somewhat leery about IBM’s purchase of RedHat and what unexpected impacts that could have, and while I absolutely love RedHat and have used RH or RH based distros near exclusively for the last 25 years I have begun to look at using Ubuntu or Debian in more of these servers. So with that in mind I am preparing to build two test mail server VM’s, one using the RH Based CentOS and the other running on Ubuntu. I’m currently planning to use Sendmail as my MTA, Spamassasin along with MailScanner or AMAVIS for anti-spam controls, and Dovecot for POP/IMAP services.
I’ll be starting to work on this project this weekend so expect to see more updates in the coming days/week. Any of you who have suggestions please feel free to leave a comment. Below is a link to my old (more like ancient) Linux projects page which has a link to one of the old, original versions of my Mail Server How To (this version has not been updated in many years so I would not suggest following it to build a mail server these days… just provided for historical purposes) along with some other old projects and info that are Linux related. Expect to see updates to these pages soon though as I get back in to more of these projects. Thanks – Tom S.
Tom’s Fedora Linux Pages: http://www.toms-games.com/linux/index.html