questions on setting up a mail server

[Jim Stapleton]

I figured I'd try cyrus, I remember hearing that one is a good mail
server. But I'm new to the mail server thing, and I'm not even sure
where to look for some of this stuff if anyone can help. Also, I plan
on just doing POP3, and only allowing secure connections - if anyone
can reccomend a good, simple server for that, that they think is
better than Cyrus, I won't object.

My main question is on authentication. I was looking at authentication
types in kmail to get an idea of what I can use, and I found:
Clear text
LOGIN
PLAIN
CRAM-MD5
Digest-MD5
NTLM
GSSAPI
APOP


I know clear text is not what I want - if I remember, that's
unencrypted. Does TLS/SSL make this a non-issue? What about the other
methdods? Aside from keeping it in a quiet comfortable jail (done) and
not on a server with anything else important, any suggestions?

Thanks,
-Jim Stapleton