Setting up a SMTP-server

[Robbban]

Hi!

We're currently do bulk email sendings for some of our customers, not spamming.

We have a tool for Windows for this e-mail sending where you can select direct delivery (connects to the emails MX) or use a SMTP-server. We are using direct delivery right now and using 40 threads. Sending 100.000 emails takes a while when the threads get stuck at slow MX's like Hotmail.

Anyway, we have a dedicated Linux server ready.

AMD Athlond 3600
2 GB of RAM
2 x 80 GB SATA (RAID 0, so just 80 GB total)
And ofcourse a gigabit NIC

Our thougts is to set this machine up as a SMTP server so the mailsending program just connects to the SMTP and flushed over all the e-mails at once and let the dedicated server handle this.

My thoughs is that a program like qmail can optimize and speed-up the delivery of the mails even better than our Windows program. Also, qmail stores the email at disk incase of an power-outage.

Anyway, is there any good reading on how to customize a linux distribution to use qmail and setup qmail with rules like only allow a certain IP to connect and deliver e-mails? Anyone with experience?

Searched the forum and I just found someone else that 2-3 years ago wanted to bulksend emails.. But it was fuzzy responses. Hopefully the people here are more expirienced today than a couple of years ago

Thank you!

[Robbban]

Observe, it's a pure SMTP machine for SENDING emails. Not reciving.

[Robbban]

Also, what dist do YOU recommend? I prefer using Debain but unsure if it has SATA RAID support enabled... We'll see that

[Roxoff]

I dont think the distro to use is relevant - any of the main distros will do it. For bulk mailing, you might want to use a specialised package; there are several available.

I found these in less than 2 minutes with Google: Dada mail, turbo mailer, and there were plenty of others, several that run on Windows too.

[Robbban]

Ah, thanks. Google have never been my strong side to perform good searches

Anyway, we're going to use linux och mac os x (if we pick a mac computer) since both are much more secure than windows... Also the stability of the application is relevant...

Going to have a look at the software right now. Installed FC6 yesterday with minimum components so we will see what happens later...

Thank you for your support!

[Robbban]

Hmm... Also... I checked the links and that is software for bulk email sending... We already got the software for that running on a windows machine and I am about to setup a SMTP-server...

[Roxoff]

Hmm... Also... I checked the links and that is software for bulk email sending... We already got the software for that running on a windows machine and I am about to setup a SMTP-server...

Forgive me for being a bit presumptuous, you see I thought you'd said earlier:

Observe, it's a pure SMTP machine for SENDING emails. Not reciving.

Obviously I'm wrong. Maybe I'll go help elsewhere.

[Robbban]

Hehe, no hard feelings now I'm from Sweden and even though my english is pretty good, I sometimes makes mistakes in my grammer and explanations.

To make things clear:
The server will be a SMTP-server (qmail MTA), Mail Transfer Agent... No WWW or FTP or anything else... Just pure port 25 for letting clients send emails through it

[Roxoff]

Well another two minutes on Google brought these up:

qmail quick-and-dirty HOWTO
qmail anti-spam HOWTO
Gentoo's qmail virtual mail hosting HOWTO