[OpenIndiana-discuss] Help, please! Starting to use postfix in an OI151_a5 environment, from scratch

[Gary Gendel]

Hans,

You have the basics right.  The problem is that there is no clean way to 
replace sendmail in OI yet.  When you install postfix, it will overwrite 
/usr/lib/sendmail.  I actually have two replacements for sendmail, I use 
Qmail for non-authorized access on port 25 because of it's superior spam 
capabilities using the spamdyke front-end.  I do have spamassassin on 
the backend to catch the few emails that get through, but that requires 
a patched version of Qmail.  I use Postfix for authorized access on port 
587 (submission) for users which has no spam checking and allows relaying.

BTW, the only bad thing about using Qmail this way is that it rejects 
mail to non-existent users later on in the process using a bounce 
message. This opens the door for backscatter spam (using the bounce to 
send spam). Spamdyke reduces this possibility, but hasn't implemented a 
true block for this (reject bad users before accepting mail) yet. This 
is in the works.

What I do is to take the time to backup the /usr/lib/sendmail for all 
three programs and then do a symbolic link to the one needed (in my case 
it's postfix).  The reason I do this is that, since sendmail is part of 
the consolidation, this binary is sometimes overwritten when you upgrade 
OI.  There is a plan somewhere to handle wholesale replacement of 
sendmail with another MTA better, but I don't know what the current 
state is.

Besides disabling sendmail, you need to disable sendmail-client as 
well.  The refresh on postfix should cause it to reload the 
configuration file.

As for dovecot (and qmail), I've been using that for so long (starting 
with SunOS), that I always compiled and installed it myself.  Some day 
I'll replace dovecot with the SFE version, but I'm in no rush.

Gary

On 7/16/12 7:58 AM, Hans J. Albertsson wrote:
> I am in the process of starting up a mailserver for about a thousand 
> mail users.
>
> This is on an OI151_a5 server.
>
> I will use postfix, dovecot and spamassassin, possibly clamav.
>
> I am right now doing a test setup, sort of a proof of concept.
>
> My problem is that all the documentation for dovecot and postfix is 
> NOT very specific to an OI installation, so I need some help in 
> understanding
> where OI differs from what postfix and dovecot docs assume.
>
> Today's first question: OI has the SMF stuff: this confuses some issues.
> I assume I'm first supposed to configure the various params for 
> postfix, like myhostname, myorigin, mydomain plus many more.
>
> Then I'm supposing I should do
>
> # svcadm disable sendmail
> # svcadm enable postfix
>
> (consider "# " as the root prompt)
>
> Is this correct?
>
> Will this do postfix start for me, and will "svcadm refresh postfix" 
> (or restart) do postfix reload?
>
> Anything else you might want to add as advice for me at this point?
>
> I'm basically trying to do the simple single domain server as in 
> Chapter 3 in The Book Of Postfix by Hildebrandt and Koetter.
>
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