I’m going to be writing a series of posts that detail my experiences in
installing a new mail server on Linux.  I have been running a mail
server called the Mercury Mail Transport System on Novell NetWare for a long time.  The NLM version of Mercury
has been robust and works … although it is lacking in some more
recent innovations in e-mail systems.  On top of that, I want to
get rid of my NetWare servers … they just aren’t what I want to be
running any more.

I have installed a server with Fedora Core 2, and as of this weekend I
finally dove in and began the actual installation of the mail
server.  After a lot of looking around, I chose qmail – “Second most popular MTA on the Internet” – and I also wanted to add the TMDA anti-spam solution.

I read through the qmail installation instructions and have to admit
that I was a little worried … until I found the “lazyinstaller for
qmail” at lazyinstaller.net. 
This is one amazing script, and it made the entire process a
breeze.  Once I had the script on my machine, I simply edited a
few parameters to define my primary domain, some paths, and a few other
items.  (NOTE:  I noticed later that I could have used their
on-line generator to create my customized script ready to download!)

Once I had customized the lazyinstaller script, I ran it and was
impressed.  It downloaded all of the source tars, unpacked them,
built the projects, customized configuration files, and set-up qmail
complete with smtp, pop3, imap (both SSL and non-SSL!) and web-based
administration tools.  There was only one error in the script that
I ran (v2.0.2) where a directory was not created for binqimap … I
created the directory and copied the contents of the config file from
the script into the new directory.  At the end of the install,
there was a short note on creating the start-up and shut-down scripts
… and I was ready to go.  I started up the services, and
everything has been running smoothly!

I have already started testing with some virtual domains, and
everything seems to be working fine.  As of tonight, I installed
TMDA, and have now started my testing with that.  I just completed
the first tests there, and it’s working great.

I have a total of ~15 mail domains with 40-50 users that I have to move
to this new server.  I’m looking forward to moving one of those
tomorrow … I’ll post more about my success!