Looks like I'll need some mail server recommendations soon as well. Sadly, I don't have any recommendations myself as I've never actually had to set those up.

So I vote up on your question. If anyone knows please post.

Well, I don't know any special lightweight mailserver, but so far I've always been really happy with Postfix.
And how much load it needs mostly depends on how many mails it has to handle.

Also it's pretty easy to tighten up in regards of relaying, so that your server can't be abused as launchpad for Spam. And together with SASL you can also have authentication.
In the office I run a setup that lets users from the LAN send mail without login, external users have to login to be allowed to send mails to addresses other than the mailserver's domain.

And of course it also works great with Procmail so that you can implement Spam- and Virus-filters.

By the way, if you plan to implement SpamAssassin I'd suggest two points:
- Use SpamD and SpamC. Performance-wise I've had better experience with that than with using the spamassassin-binary.
- Since many Spam-mails contain normal text nowadays and have a picture attached that hold the Spam-massage FuzzyOCR is really useful. I've just installed it about a week ago and it works great.

I'll read up on Postfix thanks. I doubt I'll have problems with spam as I don't intend the mailserver to be connected to the outside world.

dylunio

Thanks for those suggestions reptiler. I've installed and enabled postfix and so far it works fine for basic sending of emails from drupal. When I'll be setting up an email service I'll consider using SpamD and SpamC.

Thanks

Most, if not all, distros come with an MTA set up (presumably primarily so root can get logwatches and daemon failures) to send/receive emails locally.

If yours doesn't, go with Postfix. I'm guessing that its default configuration is to only locally send/receive emails. Sendmail has strangest, hardest-to-use configuration ever.

IIRC setting up an Internet mail server (at least on Fedora) is as easy and very similar to setting up a Web server, if you ever want to do that. (I should polish my tutorials on those and publish them here.)

Btw, email was originally used for this. The Internet part came later.

Thanks for the reply, most distro's do come with an MTA - but Gentoo doesn't so I need to find one
I've tried Sendmail once in the past and found it horrid to setup and keep secure. I'll give postfix a shot.

I've now emerged postfix an nail. This has given me the ability to get scripts etc. to send me mails on my system so I'm happy. There are a couple of things I'd like to sort out with nail, but other than that thanks for all your help.

On Debian, when you install postfix it presents you with a nice ncurses configuration screen asking for which purpose to configure it, the local use, on the internet and a third option I can't remember right now.

Anyway, I picked internet use (non-local) and it pretty much worked out of the box, at least as far as allowing Drupal to send emails goes. I didn't yet try setting up a webmail service, but I'm thinking it probably wont be too hard.

Thanks

*chuckles at the thought of webmail*

IMAP man, IMAP. dovecot makes it easy. (with TLS and all)

Webmail has its uses. IMAP is rather inconvenient when you're away from home.

I think the most popular webmail package must be squirrelmail. There's no AJAX in that one, which is both and advantage and a disadvantage.

Well on Libervis.net both options will likely be offered. You'll be able to use it with your own client or with a webmail. I don't really like squirrelmail though. There's a good chance it'll be something else.

I agree squirrelmail feels a bit too old-fashioned and clumsy.