New Cyrus Server - what would be ideal?

[m]

> From: Elizabeth Schwartz <betsy.schwartz at gmail.com>
> Date: Sun, 11 Jul 2004 16:07:13 -0400
> To: info-cyrus at lists.andrew.cmu.edu
> Subject: New Cyrus Server - what would be ideal?
> 
> My current mail server has Solaris 8, cyrus, silkymail, sieve,
> sendmail and a couple of milters (clamav and vbsfilter) and an RBL or
> two. We're an academic site with about a thousand users and 15k-40k
> messages/day.
> 
> I'm planning to build a new, larger, server with Solaris 9, and cyrus,
> and migrate the existing accounts. Unanswered questions: sendmail or
> postfix? (or exim or qmail?) What combination of milters and filters?
> Silkymail or Squirrelmail?

I recommend the following, which I use on 15 different servers, ranging from
30K to 450K messages/day.

Postfix (latest stable release)
Cyrus
Sqwebmail or TWIG
    Sqwebmail is the Courier webmail implementation
    TWIG is available at twig.screwdriver.net, and is nice, but can be
intensive due to extensive feature set & php.

As for filtering, I typically filter out all attachments and reject any
message with any attachments other than .doc, .xls, .jpg, .gif, .png, or
other "harmless" stuff.  Anything with .exe, .pif, .com, .bat, etcetera is
rejected at the server level.

SpamAssassin using Maxim Paperno's spampd program works great.

Implementing greylisting with Postgrey also has worked wonders to reduce
spam.

I also suggest requiring "STRICT RFC COMPLIANCE" as to RFC 821, 822, 2821
and 2822.  This means rejecting everything from improperly configured
senders.  While it certainly causes collateral damage, people who don't know
how to do DNS (which is usually the problem), shouldn't be running servers
either.

If you'd like any assistance, feel free to ask.

Mark J. Nernberg

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