[HECnet] Bringing Email In-House

[Kari Uusim ki]

On 5.8.2010 18:44, Brian Hechinger wrote:
On Thu, Aug 05, 2010 at 11:36:13AM -0400, Steve Davidson wrote:
standard email clients but would also like to be able to ssh into a
local box and read mail via a character terminal.

I use a variety of OS platforms to provide email availability and I have found
that either NetBSD or Linux is the easiest to deal with and since you already
have Linux that would be the direction I would suggest.

As much as I'd love to run a mail server on VMS, I would have to agree with Steve
on this one.

As to accessing mail from a terminal vi ssh, I do exactly that myself.   What I have
been doing is I run mutt locally on the mail server, but I've configured it to use
IMAP to access the mail server.   It has worked very well.

-brian


Maybe I have to give the opposite opinion to keep the balance. :)

I have been running my own mail server on VMS and some other organizations servers as well. I'm not talking about my work where I've been doing it, too.

It is very simple to configure a mail server just with the native software (VMS and UCX or TCP/IP). You just run sys$manager:tcpip$config and then configure the SMTP server and the selection of client protocol you want to use (IMAP or POP3).
You can then use a browser-based mail client (e.g. Firefox), some other   external client like Thunderbird or the regular VMS mail client (CLI).

There are more sophisticated mail server software for VMS like PMDF, All-In-One (aka Office Server), MX, etc.
Some of them are licensed for Hobbyists, but they need more effort to configure and maintain, but they also provide more features. It is your choice.

My point here is that it is really easy to use VMS as a mail server platform. There are natively some features which aren't found out-of-the-box on unices. One of them is DOS attack resistance and another is Intrusion Detection and avoidance.

If you like to know more, I'll be happy to help.


Kari