This last weekend I completed a one year project to migrate my core
mail services from Novell NetWare.  And it ended up going
amazingly smooth!

I run a mail server that is hosting e-mail for a number of domains, and
a large number of personal friends.  Over a year ago, as spam
became more and more of an issue, I realized that I was going to have
to move to a more “main stream” operating system and e-mail service to
gain the latest features.  I had been running the Mercury mail
server for years … however it lacked many things.

I started to look at the services that I wanted to support, and one of
those was the option to easily run TMDA.  From there … I found
qmail.

I was told that installing qmail was a pain, however I quickly located
the “LazyInstaller” for qmail … and it worked smoothly.  It
fetched the packages, built and installed the code, and even added
various options and patches that I wanted on the server – anti-spam,
SSL, IMAP, Web Management, etc.

As of Friday, I rolled the MX records on my server to the new qmail
server … there were a few hitches that I had to fix.  By
Saturday I rolled the CN records to point to the new server.  As
of Monday of this week … I am now running on qmail … with almost no
spam coming in … and all of my users in business.

I’ll post more of my experience from this week …