• RedHatFedora? FC3 - A well-documented mature OS (note that CentOS? should be interchangeably used here)
• Amavis-New? - Email handler
• SpamAssassin - Rules-based spam filter
• DCC? - Compares Emails to known database of spam emails
• Razor? - (Vipul's Razor) Another spam database comparison tool
• ClamAV? - Virus scanner
• Dovecot - Fast IMAP server
• FetchMail? - To pull Emails from other servers
• Procmail? - Filters Emails based on rules
• [SquirrelMail] - Webmail solution
• rsync? - Backup solution
• RulesDuJour - SpamAssassin rules updater
• TripWire? - An file system monitoring application

The plan looks like this:

Fetchmail accesses my accounts on other servers and forwards emails from them to Postfix. Postfix also handles email coming directly to my home server. Postfix then hands off the emails to Amavis. Amavis washes the mails through SpamAssassin (checks for Spam using a variety of statistical comparisons), DCC, and Razor (which both check the emails against known spam emails), and then ClamAV? (an Open Source virus scanner). Depending on the results of the scanners, Amavis passes the emails through, tags them as spam, or cleans/trashes the infected ones. Passed/tagged emails are then filed by Procmail into their correct IMAP Mailbox folders (Inbox, Junk, etc.).

Using an IMAP mail client, I connect to the mailserver using SSL (encryption) and Dovecot handles the IMAP interface between the client and my Mailbox folders.

Alternatively, I can make a secure connection via a web browser to the webmail application (SquirrelMail? which can access my Mailbox folders through Dovecot.

A clone of the servers key folders (home, etc, var) is backed up on a regular basis to an external machine/drive so even if the power supply detonates and takes out the whole system, the other drive won’t get eaten.

Here are the RedHatFedoraSetupSteps

-- ChrisWeiss - 16 May 2005