1 Topic by answerman

  • answerman
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Topic: Contemplating making the move to iRedMail

Good day, everyone.  I've been researching iRedMail, and it looks like it's mostly what I've been looking for.  I have a few specific questions that I would like answers to.  This seems like the place to ask them.

Background:

I run a website design and hosting company, and we provide email hosting to about 1200 users over about 400 domains.  For reasons having to do with the way we used to have things configured, we've always used Windows-based mailservers (used Imail for about 7 years, and then SmarterMail the past 4).  I've come to realize that due to changes in how we do things, there is no reason anymore that the mailserver needs to be Windows based, so I'm looking to move to a Linux-based solution.

So, currently the setup is as follows: SmarterMail on a VPS running Windows Server 2003, with another VPS running CentOS to act as our SpamAssassin machine (SmarterMail has a "hook" allowing us to use an external SpamAssassin server).  We process about 40,000 messages a day.  Our machines are located in an enterprise-level colocation facility, so bandwidth, firewalls, ISP restrictions, etc. are not an issue. 

The new mailserver will be a standalone VPS most likely running CentOS (just because I'm most familiar with it), and I intend to migrate users and domains from the old server to the new a few at a time, instead of all at once.  The machine won't do anything other than act as a mailserver.  It appears that iRedOS would work perfectly in this scenario.

Requirements:

Web-based admin to add and edit domains, users, and aliases.  It looks like iRedAdmin-PRO will take care of most of this.

POP3 and IMAP (with IMAP IDLE) support.  Most of our clients connect via POP, so that the server isn't storing everyone's archived messages.  If hard drive space wasn't an issue I'd have everyone using IMAP.

Easy to use webmail client, for our clients who don't use a POP3 client.  Roundcube looks fine for this.

Multiple domains sharing one IP address.  As mentioned, we have over 400 domains we host, so this is important.

Mailing list support.  We use iContact for any bulk mailing we do, but some of our clients maintain their own lists.

Questions:

The VPS I intend to use will be a dedicated single core VPS configured with 2GB RAM and 100GB hard drive space.  Sufficient?

Does the package include a listserv?  I have one client who uses it.

Can the setup of users and domains be scripted/automated in any way?  I know we're moving from a completely different platform, so I'm not expecting a single click migration solution, but any way to speed the process would be helpful.

Is SpamAssassin support built in?  And if so, is it a "hook" to an external machine on port 783, or is it integrated into iRedOS?  I'd  like to combine the mailserver and SpamAssassin server to get rid of one machine, but I don't have a problem continuing with the separate machine if it can be configured to hook to the external SpamAssassin server.

Does the aliasing allow for forwarding to another external domain?  I have a few clients who have their domain-based aliases forwarding to their ISP-based account, or their Yahoo email account or whatever.  I know it's not a good practice, but I need to support it for the time being.

That's all I have for now, but I'm sure I'll have more questions based on the answers to these.  Thanks!

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Spider Email Archiver: On-Premises, lightweight email archiving software developed by iRedMail team. Supports Amazon S3 compatible storage and custom branding.

2 Reply by ZhangHuangbin

  • ZhangHuangbin
  • ZhangHuangbin
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Re: Contemplating making the move to iRedMail

answerman wrote:

It appears that iRedOS would work perfectly in this scenario.

iRedMail works pretty well on RHEL/CentOS, so install it with iRedMail script set is better than iRedOS. and iRedOS is a little out of date.

answerman wrote:

Web-based admin to add and edit domains, users, and aliases.  It looks like iRedAdmin-PRO will take care of most of this.

That's right.

To be clear, iRedAdmin-Pro works only with OpenLDAP at this time, edition for MySQL backend will be available on Feb 01, ideally.

answerman wrote:

Does the package include a listserv?  I have one client who uses it.

listserv? i guess you mean 'mailman' or 'Sympa' like mailing list manager.
No, iRedMail doesn't ship it by default.
But iRedMail (with OpenLDAP backend) supports a build-in mail list, it's like 'alias'. You can try it in our demo:
http://demo.iredmail.org/ (Choose a domain, then create a mail list).

answerman wrote:

Can the setup of users and domains be scripted/automated in any way?  I know we're moving from a completely different platform, so I'm not expecting a single click migration solution, but any way to speed the process would be helpful.

Take a look at scripts iRedMail-x.y.z/tools/create_mail_user_*, they're used for this purpose. I guess you'd like to modify something to match your need.
http://code.google.com/p/iredmail/sourc … il%2Ftools

answerman wrote:

Is SpamAssassin support built in?  And if so, is it a "hook" to an external machine on port 783, or is it integrated into iRedOS?  I'd  like to combine the mailserver and SpamAssassin server to get rid of one machine, but I don't have a problem continuing with the separate machine if it can be configured to hook to the external SpamAssassin server.

iRedMail ships Amavisd-new, SpamAssassin, ClamAV.

answerman wrote:

Does the aliasing allow for forwarding to another external domain?  I have a few clients who have their domain-based aliases forwarding to their ISP-based account, or their Yahoo email account or whatever.  I know it's not a good practice, but I need to support it for the time being.

Of course iRedMail supports mail alias. But i don't quite understand what "forwarding to another external domain" means. Do you mean forward all emails to another domain? or a domain alias?

Hope it helps.

3 Reply by answerman

  • answerman
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Re: Contemplating making the move to iRedMail

OK, let me explain the alias.  What I would like to do is:  let's say we have the domain "example.com".  I would like to be able to forward the alias "bob@example.com" to "bob@hotmail.com".  This would be on a user by user basis, per account, not all emails from a domain.

I think the alias would work for a mailing list as I asked.  Otherwise, I can use a third party listserv.  The mailing list needs to support "reply to all" for all members of the list.

The only questions left:  can SpamAssassin be run on an external machine?  The only reason I consider doing that is because of the volume of mail we process (about 40,000 messages a day).  If it can be run on a single machine without too much overhead I'd rather do it that way.

4 Reply by ZhangHuangbin

  • ZhangHuangbin
  • ZhangHuangbin
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Re: Contemplating making the move to iRedMail

answerman wrote:

I would like to be able to forward the alias "bob@example.com" to "bob@hotmail.com".  This would be on a user by user basis, per account, not all emails from a domain.

iRedMail supports alias like this.

answerman wrote:

The only questions left:  can SpamAssassin be run on an external machine?  The only reason I consider doing that is because of the volume of mail we process (about 40,000 messages a day).  If it can be run on a single machine without too much overhead I'd rather do it that way.

iRedMail runs all components on same machine by default, and spamassassin is invoked by Amavisd-new. i don't know how to make it work the way you expected yet.

Is it possible to use the default way (run all components on same machine) for testing?

5 Reply by answerman

  • answerman
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Re: Contemplating making the move to iRedMail

It's absolutely possible to run as the default for testing.  I was just wondering about the ability to use an external server for SpamAssassin.  I'll be giving it a try in the next week or two.