Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by manbitesdog 700 days ago
Until Thunderbird added support for Exchange there was a slight hole on Linux (no FOSS mail solution with support for it) but right now I'd say everything works more or less out of the box. SPAM filtering and categorization could be a bit more automated, but in general I'd say everything is covered.

Mail server projects are a different story though. There's no simple way to create a fully fledged mail server without weeks of pain to configure spam, routing, calendars, security... there are some preconfigured images in all major cloud platforms, but nothing like `apt install mail-server` that pops out a simple config assistant in an already existing server.

2 comments

I've been using Evolution EWS for well over a decade.

I've been running small mail systems for around 25 years. Just like learning to drive - lots of stuff to learn up front. Just remember to fill up every now and again and keep on top of maintenance.

I think maintaining the MUA access to the mail server is one of the more complicated issues. A globally accessible IMAP or POP3 service faces a lot of abuse. These days, I use MUA's the that read directly off the spool. Old fashioned, but heads off all kinds of badness.
Mail User Agent is sooo old school ... a MUA is a Make Up Artist these days. I'm happy with that - the world moves.

I have no idea what "MUA's the that read directly off the spool" means.

I run a few Exim MTAs ie SMTP front ends. Some front MS Exchange and some front Dovecot imapd. They work fine.

/var/mail

No listener required, or the services, authentication and encryption that go with them. In this case I run email for myself. Email gets pushed from an Internet MTA with global addresses, to a local MTA that happens to be my workstation. I either read the email from the console, or ssh in through a jump host.

I would love something like this, right now the closest I've gotten to a fairly easy setup is using Cyberpanel.