Email (electronic mail) is fast becoming the most dominating form of communication in the world. Sending mail with the post is way to slow in out fast paced world. Talking on a phone is fast but having a permanent record of it or making a permanent record of it is difficult.

Building an email server is not difficult and if the mail server is for a number of co-operating users. You do not need to do much to keep it going. However most of us needs to send mail to the whole wide world and this is where the "internet hell" starts. There will always be people that will turn a good thing into a bad instrument. Spam and viruses is with us and we need to battle against it.

As far as mail servers MTA's is concerned, we use Postfix. Postfix is easy configurable from the most simple one domain systems to many virtual domains. It also allows many types of anti-virus and anti-spam measures to be implemented.

Some of the measures implemented is:

As mentioned above, one of the reasons to communicate with email is to keep permanent record of our messages. This can become very cumbersome since the amount of messages just keeps growing. You can delete some and manage the rest with separate folders etc. but it is a big task that takes time. Making backups of these mails is even more cumbersome. The files are big and takes time out of a busy schedule.

Let us introduce the mail archiver. We can set up a machine in conjunction with your mail server to save each and every message (except spam, viruses and other mail with rules that can be setup) in the mail archive. So messages can be deleted from your normal mail program without fear of loosing it permanently. The archives can be searched easily with different criteria to find that old mail.

To complete the mail server line-up is a webmail client. We use SquirrelMail and Roundcube mail.