I have a portal for my town, and I would like to offer free web-based email accounts.

Very basic.
People apply for an email account. They can receive mail. Read it, reply to it, compose and send.
And that's about it.

I ain't no genius, so I'm looking for something very easy to set up and admin.
As GUI as possible 'coz the command line is "terra incognita" for me.

This is what I have:
I'm serving my own on my Linux box, with Apache, MySQL, PHP, nuke, etc...

I have Postfix running, but I know absolute squat about it. I've never used it. I don't even know how to access it and/or admin it.

I've been looking into Exim and SquirrelMail, but I'm still not sure what they do.

What I need to know most is what is it exactly that I need for a VERY BASIC setup.

Do I need Postfix + Exim or SquirrelMail + some sort of html/php GUI for people to access their mailbox + ? ? ? ...

I'm completely blank about this, and I hope somebody can give me a push in the right direction.

Thanks for any help.

    6 days later

    Technobum,

    postfix, sendmail and exim are essentially equivalent "mail transfer agent" suites. Stick with the one you have. It's secure and easy to administer.

    An MTA sends email to other systems and receives email from other systems, writing it into a local spoolfile. It doesn't provide any facilities for reading it.

    To provide for reading the mail, you'll need to install an IMAP and/or POP3 server. The software is probably already installed on your system and merely needs to be enabled.

    To provide Web-based mail, install SquirrelMail in conjunction with IMAP. READ THE DOCS carefully, as there are some "tuning" tricks to match Squirrel with the specific IMAP server you use. If you get them wrong, performance will be horrible.

    Every user will need a Unix account, which can be set up without shell access. "man adduser" for details. You can not create Unix accounts from a PHP Web server for security reasons.

      Thanks. This is great info.

      How do i find out if IMAP or pop3 is already installed?

      "You can not create Unix accounts from a PHP Web server..."
      Does that mean that subscriptions for an email account will be "pending" upon my activating them manually?

        I hope you read this before you create several hundred local accounts on your server!!!

        For two very good howtos on servin' up some mail check out these two links:

        http://www.jerfu.com/toaster/FullToaster_1.0.6.html
        http://www.pipeline.com.au/staff/mbowe/isp/webmail-server.htm

        The jerfu site is without mysql and the pipeline site is with...

        Yeah, they're for a full-blown email server but you can dig through and get the info you need for web mail.

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