setting up mail server

Having had no experience setting up a mail server, I am probably not the best person to respond to this, but I figured I would try.

It depends on what kind of mail server you want. First, you need to pick an MTA. I'm not sure if sendmail comes installed on Fedora Core by default. If it does, sendmail is probably a good MTA to use for this since it is widely used and there's lots of documentation on it. Here's a comprehensive sendmail howto:

http://www.siliconvalleyccie.com/linux-hn/sendmail.htm

You can also check the official documentation at http://www.sendmail.org/ as well as the manual pages.

Here's a few other MTAs and corresponding howtos:

Postfix: http://www.metaconsultancy.com/whitepapers/smtp.htm
Qmail: http://www.zippydesign.com/ying/linux/qmail/index.html

Remember to check the official docs, too.

Well a good general tutorial can be found here.

But, maybe some more detail about what you want to accomplish would be helpful? Me personally, I run Postfix instead of Sendmail. To me it is much simpler and easier to understand the configs. For IMAP/POP I use Courier with Procmail and Spamassassin.

I've worked with many mail systems though both professionally and for fun, and the best rule is to go with what you understand the best. Some people, for example, absolutely swear by Dovecot or UW-IMAP; some like Sendmail and many also like Postfix.

Is this on an internet connected server? Retrieving mail from an ISP account? Do you need SMTP and POP/IMAP? Details definitely would help.

I finally got around to doing this using dotmil's link. I couldn't get spamassassin set up, so I'll just rely on Thunderbird's clientside spam fitler. My new email is

What did you have problems with on SA? I usually run it as a daemon and pipe to that through .procmailrc

Anything we could help with?