jeff May 11, 2017 No Comments

Background

Most mail servers made of Mail delivery agent (MDA) and Mail Transfer Agents (MTA). MDA software used to routes e-mail to its destination. You use MDA such as Dovecot, Qpopper, Courier, and Cyrus IMAP/POP3 servers. MTA software used to transfers e-mail between servers or computers. You use MTA such as Exim, Qmail, Sendmail, OpenSMTPD, Postfix, and others. Apart from MTA and MDA, you need to install and use Antispam, Antivirus, Webmail and other software too. You need to make sure your IP address stay clean. Apart from mail server software configuration, you need to install some database to store user names, email IDs, password and other information. Setting up and maintaining a full-fledged email server is a complicated task. You need to be a technology expert and a good sysadmin to set it up.
 Complete Open Source Mail Servers Solutions
However, you can skip many of configuration problems and setup complete email solution for privacy and security reasons. So, I am going to list software that can turn any Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD or Unix-powered into mail server out of a box with the following goals:

  • The software must be open source
  • The software must run on Linux or Unix-like server
  • The software must deploy quickly
  • The software setup must be easy for new sysadmin
  • The software must support multiple users and multiple domain names
  • Must promote privacy and decentralization

1. Mail-in-a-Box

You can take back control of your email with this easy-to-deploy mail server in a box:

Mail-in-a-Box lets you become your own mail service provider in a few easy steps. It’s sort of like making your own gmail, but one you control from top to bottom. Technically, Mail-in-a-Box turns a fresh cloud computer into a working mail server. But you don’t need to be a technology expert to set it up. It implements modern mail protocols (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC) and the latest security best practices, including opportunistic TLS, strong ciphers, and HSTS. When enabled, DNSSEC (with DANE TLSA) provides a higher level of protection against active attacks. Exchange ActiveSync is also available as a beta feature.

A Control Panel
Software feature includes:

  1. Automatic DNS configuration for your domain
  2. Spam filtering
  3. Greylisting
  4. Backups to Amazon S3
  5. Static website hosting
  6. Free TLS (SSL) certificates from Let’s Encrypt and more
Operating system : Ubuntu 14.04 x64 only
License : Public domain using CC0
Paid support : N/A
Download url : Mail-in-a-Box

2. iRedMail

A full-featured mail server solution based on Postfix and Dovecot:

The right way to build your mail server with open source softwares. It Works on Linux and *BSD family of operating system. You can setup mail server in several minutes. End users are forced to use mail services through secure connections (POP3/IMAP/SMTP over TLS, webmail with HTTPS). Emails are encrypted in transit using TLS if possible. Passwords are stored in SSHA512 or BCRYPT (BSD).

iredmail admin
Software feature includes:

  1. Spam filtering
  2. TLS/SSL
  3. Manage your calendars (CalDAV), address books (CardDAV), tasks on a easy to use web UI or your mobile devices (iOS, Android, BlackBerry 10, Windows Phone)
  4. SpamAssassin, ClamAV, SPF, DKIM, greylisting, whitelisting, blacklisting. Quarantining detected spam into SQL database for further review
  5. Stores mail accounts in your favourte backend: OpenLDAP, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL
  6. Web mail
  7. Web admin panel
Operating system : Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD
License : ????
Paid support : Yes
Download url : iRedMail

3. Modoboa

Mail hosting made simple for you:

Modoboa is a mail hosting and management platform including a modern and simplified Web User Interface. It provides useful components such as an administration panel or a webmail. Modoboa integrates with well known software such as Postfix or Dovecot. A SQL database (MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQLite) is used as a central point of communication between all components. It is written in Python and uses the Django, jQuery and Bootstrap frameworks.

Modoboa
Software feature includes:

  1. Administration panel
  2. Amavisd-new frontend
  3. Webmail
  4. Per-user Sieve filters
  5. Autoreply messages for Postfix
  6. Graphical statistics about email traffic
  7. Radicale management frontend
Operating system : Debian and CentOS based Linux distributions only
License : ISC License
Paid support : Yes
Download url : modoboa