I need tips to admin a mail server .. sendmail

[someone_4]

Hello everyone
I am in need of some tips on how to admin a sendmail server. Here are the details we are running Sendmail 8.8.6 (PHNE_17190).All the mail is in /var/mail/ it is it sits on /dev/vg01/lvol1. We have 7920 files in the /var/mail directory witch means we have about 7920 email accounts and growing. This is a for a service that we offer the public. Now I need some tips to admin this mail server. Here are some questions.
1.how to restrict the mail box directory to a max size? So their emails files to grow to big
2.how to configure sendmail so it does not keep email after they've been downloaded.
3.How many users can a sendmail server handle?
4.any tips to admin my mail server. what to look for in mailq and so on.

thanks

Richard

[linuxfan · Accepted solution]

Hi Richard,

This should answer most of your questions.

http://www.sendmail.org/~ca/email/lfaq.html

This link gives lots of other information

http://www.sendmail.org/~ca/email/misc.html


-HTH
Ramesh

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Richard,

I am not sure if sendmail can provide you with these features. As work around, I will write my own scripts to acccomplish what you need.

1. I would turn on Quotas on the file system first. For ex., I will turn on a max of 5 MB for each user. However, I will write a script to check if a particular mailbox is more than 4MB and then send a mail automatically to the
user. If the user ignores the warning message, he will not get any more messages after 5 MB.

#You need to modify and elaborate this script.

cd /var/mail
for MBOX in `ls`
do
SIZE=`du -sk $MBOX |awk '{print $2}'`
if [ $SIZE -ge 4000 ]
then
echo "Your Limit Reached" |mailx -s "From Sys Admin" $MBOX
fi
done

2. This is really dependent on how the user accesses the mail. POP/IMAPcan be used but we need to configure it at the client side to delete the messages once read. I am not sure if we can recompile popper to make this feature default.

There are other free mail packages available at this location
http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Networking/Mail/alpha.html

-Sri

[someone_4]

Great tips thanks .. !

[Ralf Hildebrandt]

Sendmail is a major security hole. Drop it and use postfix instead: www.postfix.org

It's faster, more secure and easier to administer.

You're questions are not totally sendmail related: What you need is a POP/IMAP server, not only sendmail!

I recommend courier-IMAP & Postfix as combo. They kick ass.