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SurgeMail - a mail server |
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Written by Gavin Cameron
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Tuesday, 24 August 2004 |
Surgemail is a commercial E-mail server that packs a punch and runs a
treat on FreeBSD 4.10. It is currently being used to manage the VicFUG
mailing list and mail for around 70 other domains.
Several months ago, while building a new E-mail server, I decided to
look around for 'all-in-one' mail server software that provided all the
needed functionality for hosting E-mail for our end users.
On the wish list was
- SMTP
- SMTP Authentication
- POP
- Secure POP
- IMAP
- Secure IMAP
- Ability to plug multiple virus scanners in
- Ability to use RBLs and spam filters with the ability to both block and tag
- Webmail (both HTTP and HTTPS)
- TLS/SSL
- Virtual domain hosting
- Mailing lists
- Web based administration for the server as a whole, for each domain and for each user
Also on the list, though not a hard requirement, was someway to migrate
from the old mail server software to the server server software. I had
a workaround in
mind using OfflineIMAP if there wasn't a migration path.
Pretty standard list of requirements. I could have continued to make
use of the plethora of software from the ports tree that I had
installed on the old mail server,
around 70 different ports in
total, to satisfy a fair proportion of the requirements but keeping all
the ports up to date can be a daunting task.
A Google search
yielded SurgeMail so I started to investigate. The capabilities were
impressive and the cost wasn't all that much in the grand scheme of
things and to top it off you could download a 30 day evaluation of the
software to have a play.
Installation was simple (Note: make sure you stop any other mail services before
installing so your network ports are available) and was setting up my first domain
in about 10 minutes.
A quick play by myself and several others convinced us that SurgeMail was the
way to go on the new mail server.
Back to the migration of the 70 domains. SurgeMail made it so easy
that, apart from tweaking a couple of settings, the migration from the
old server to the new server was an automated task. When a user logged
into the new server for the first time using POP or IMAP, SurgeMail,
under the covers, logged into the old server and transfered all of the
messages, and IMAP Folder structure across to the new server. The
software is even smart enough to know that is someone hasn't logged
into the new server yet to forward any new incoming E-mail to the old
server!
Since installing SurgeMail about two months ago it's been trundling along without a glitch and with no maintenance.
If you want to see SurgeMail in action, drop me an E-mail.
No... I don't own any shares in NetWin ;-)
URLs
http://www.surgemail.com/surgemail - Surgmail
http://freshmeat.net/projects/offlineimap/ - offlineIMAP
http://www.netwinsite.com/ - NetWin
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