# For thoose who doesnt use control panels - mail



## danni (Apr 15, 2014)

Hey guys,

Im curious as to how you guys do with email, on your servers that doesnt use control panels.

- Do you rely on 3rd party service

- Do you install it your self as a part of your lamp stack

I've always been reluctant to go "all-in" using only a VPS instead of shared hosting, simply because I dont know how to handle this - seems like a big hassle to manage your self (atleast to me, who's basic in terms of Linux).

looking forward to your replys


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## HalfEatenPie (Apr 15, 2014)

Haha.  I'm just going to assume this is all about incoming e-mails and mailboxes (because outgoing there's those bulk-mail services like mandrill and whatnot).  

Originally relied on a 3rd part service (http://mxroute.com by Jarland's a nice service, although I will admit he's partnered with us on it). 

Been perfect, always working, can't complain at all.  But right now all of my mail services are working off of an installation of VestaCP.  In all honesty it's a real pick-and-choose type system (everything's enabled, but if you can handle it CLI-wise then you can customize it very easily/well!).  

But to recommend something, I'd have to give it to MXRoute.  Jarland did some pretty cool things to it behind the scenes that makes it so much better.


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## switsys (Apr 15, 2014)

If you want to host your own, and make it very easy for yourself; try iRedMail.


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## manacit (Apr 15, 2014)

E-Mail administration is one of those things I outright refuse to do unless I absolutely need to. Mail servers are brittle, annoying, and actually getting mail through to other peoples' inboxes can be an absolute pain in the ass. 

For mailboxes, I just use Google Apps or another hosted solution. It's easy, free for me personally (and cheap for businesses), and it's more or less guaranteed to always work. 

For outgoing solutions, there's (fortunately) tons of services to pick from between mandrill and stuff.


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## danni (Apr 15, 2014)

Thanks for your replys 

Ill try and look at your suggestions !


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## marlencrabapple (Apr 15, 2014)

I have exim4 installed just in case we need to send outgoing mail from a Wordpress contact form or something, but for the most part its 100% Mandrill and Google Apps for things that I care about. If I had any idea what I was doing when it came to mail I'd be more likely to most it myself, but considering how little I know its better to leave it to the pros.


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## datarealm (Apr 15, 2014)

danni said:


> Hey guys,
> 
> Im curious as to how you guys do with email, on your servers that doesnt use control panels.


postfix for smtp (+mysql for virt users)

dovecot for imap

spamassassin + clamav for filtering

squirrelmail and roundcube for webmail

i've also used mailcleaner (opensource version) for an in-line filtering solutions (ala barracuda) and it is quite nice,

things could be simplified down a bit if you are only doing mail for your domain, or be far more complex if you are doing mail for hundreds of thousands of users in addition to the mail coming off their web sites.  in our shared environment there's a whole internal system we created to try and catch spam (be it spambots, abused wordpress installs, etc) before it gets off our network...


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## DomainBop (Apr 15, 2014)

datarealm said:


> postfix for smtp (+mysql for virt users)
> 
> dovecot for imap
> 
> ...


I made two changes to that list to reflect my preferred setup


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## drmike (Apr 15, 2014)

Reoccurring topic and need.

iRedMail is often promoted, but failed to deliver last time I tried to waste a few days with email.

Outsourcing this is meh, blah, sucks.  Definitely a need for how to / script that just works.


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## DomainBop (Apr 15, 2014)

drmike said:


> Outsourcing this is meh, blah, sucks.  Definitely a need for how to / script that just works.


ISPConfig3 actually works very well for setting up a multi-user multi-domain email server with all of the pieces I listed.  How to Forge has some easy to follow guides.  Recommended RAM for full setup 1GB.  If you disable Amavis (a memory hog)/ClamAV/SpamAssasin you could probably do it on a 512MB VPS.

ispconfig3 (nginx)> http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-server-debian-wheezy-nginx-bind-dovecot-ispconfig-3

ispconfig3 (apache) > http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-server-debian-wheezy-apache2-bind-dovecot-ispconfig-3

squirrelmail is installed by default, use these how-tos for an alternative

roundcube (nginx)> http://www.howtoforge.com/using-roundcube-webmail-with-ispconfig-3-on-debian-wheezy-nginx

roundcube (apache) > http://www.howtoforge.com/using-roundcube-webmail-with-ispconfig-3-on-debian-wheezy-apache2

horde (with apache)>http://www.howtoforge.com/install-horde-5-webmail-for-ispconfig-on-debian-wheezy

useful tweaks for security, etc (for squeeze but most can be used with wheezy) > http://www.howtoforge.com/extending-perfect-server-debian-squeeze-ispconfig-3

disable amavis, etc to save RAM > http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/web-tech/3261-how-optimize-ispconfig.html


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## datarealm (Apr 15, 2014)

oops - yes, i did leave amavis off my list.  that should certainly be on there!


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## nunim (Apr 15, 2014)

marlencrabapple said:


> I have exim4 installed just in case we need to send outgoing mail from a Wordpress contact form or something, but for the most part its 100% Mandrill and Google Apps for things that I care about. If I had any idea what I was doing when it came to mail I'd be more likely to most it myself, but considering how little I know its better to leave it to the pros.


You should look at switching to sSMTP, it's perfect for this sort of job.

https://wiki.debian.org/sSMTP

I've converted most of my servers to use sSMTP instead of sendmail/Exim and I run a single "mailhub" based off VestaCP.


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## peterw (Apr 16, 2014)

I use this bottom-up tutorial:


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## splitice (Apr 16, 2014)

I pipe everything (for all my services) through an external VPS mail server running Zimbra.

Never had any problems with this, being external and based off 3rd party software its quite stable / not fragile.


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