Email services, including Listservs

We don't provide email accounts (and I recommend against doing so, but pocket lab servers still need to run a variety of mail services to meet the needs of other applications. That will require interfacing with your university (or other provider) mailhosts, as well as thinking through and configuring your own services. As we need to maintain our configuration, we'll add more detail to these notes.

Mailservers (postfix)

postfix is our prefered mailserver (not sendmail - yuck!). When you install postfix, make sure you not only stop sendmail, but actually remove it from the system and add it to the yum excludes list (YumDotConf). Why use postfix rather than sendmail? The reasons are legion - it's just so much easier, cleaner, safer, more stable. But why trust me? Read for yourself or best of all, try it and see.

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Listservs (MailMan)

We use Mailman for our email lists. Mailman is written in Python, and is easy to use. It has built-in web-based archiving via pipermail archives, which are pretty ugly, but has hooks for use with MHonArc. MHonArc is quite nice.

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[see also ServerAdminGuidelines]