Qindel Group

My last experience was a consultancy to migrate a corporate mail system to something else. The original system was based on several different Unices, from Debian, RedHat, Ubuntu and Solaris with the standard applications that you could imagine:

• Postfix as the MTA with a lot nice antispam filtering rules using Amavis with spamassassin, postgrey, RBLs and other nice things.
• Courier Imap with Maildir as Message Store.
• IMP/Horde as webmail server.
• OpenLDAP as the corporate directory service.
• For mailing lists their choice was mailman.

If you ask me, that is the first thing that would come to mind to an old fashioned mail guy as me, well, actually I would use sendmail with mailscanner (I know too old…), and I was missing mailfromd (if you haven’t heard of it, have a look you will like it if you want to play nice milter rules)

Their first choice was MS-Exchange, and the reasoning behind it was the ease of administration. If you take in account the cost of a sysadmin with all the relevant knowledge and to be able to administer this on a 24×7 basis you end up easily for a medium platform with a lot of human resources. Just ask yourselves how many people do you know that know enough to handle a spam attack and know what to do with the necessary confidence. I can probably count around 20, and most of them are in the company where we are used to deal with this kind of problems….

On the other hand I am rather fond of Open Source Solutions, so I asked around, and some of my colleagues had implemented Zimbra, so I decided to give it a try and I have to say that I like it (well did I say that I would have used sendmail instead of postfix? , although I have to admit that the architecture of Postix outweights the one of sendmail…).

So what is Zimbra you might ask. Well plainly it is an opensource platform with commercial support:

• MTA is Postfix with Amavis and Spamassissin.
• ngnix as web and imap/pop3 proxy.
• openldap which holds a central configuration for all the components. Replication is obviously also supported. There is a schema for the application, and you can use another one for the email users. Authentication can be delegated to other LDAP or AD server.
• The message store is something like the following: messages are stored in files and the index to the messages and attachments is done in a mysql db mapping userids and files. Obviously for a multiple destination email only one copy is saved.
• the webmail platform directly is directly hosted in the message store, and it uses jetty as the web application server. It has also three different interfaces. W3C HTML, AJAX (which remembers to Yahoo, …) and simple HTML for mobile devices…

Now a nice picture for the Zimbra webmail server

• It also has calendaring support integrated. So very nice as well.

About the nice commercial options are (the ones that I was most interested in):

• Offline storage for emails (two level storage).
• Cluster support for RH cluster. Although in my case that was not worth to go for commercial support.