Looking for Software on your site...

[Peter Risdon]

Donald Corn wrote:

> Hi.  My account rep at Verio suggested I look at your site for 
> software.  I am not a technical person, more in the marketing area; 
> but once I find what I am looking for I can pass onto our programmer.

FreeBSD is an operating system which comes with some very elegant ways 
to manage application software, but you're talking about the application 
software here. And there's an awful lot of it available. So the first 
point is, you have Choice. As the Perl people say, there's more than one 
way to do it.

FreeBSD is an excellent operating system for this type of role, but 
there is so much choice of software that you would almost certainly find 
it cost-effective to involve someone who already has a good idea of the 
field.

>
> Specifically, we are looking for a mail server solution

sendmail is the default mail server software with FreeBSD and it's 
excellent, but you could also use Exim, qmail, postfix and a couple of 
other alternatives. Each has different merits.

> that will do personalization

I'm not too sure what you mean by that...

> /html transmissions

mail servers are generally agnostic about whether the mails are in plain 
text, html or both.

> , plus the required subscribe/unsubscribe functions.

That's a mailing list. Mailing list software runs alongside a mail 
server. Again, lots of choice... ezmlm, mailman, majordomo...

>
> We are also using @Mail and I saw it referenced as a Webmail solution 
> on your site.
>
> Can you help point me where to find the overview of your software 
> programs in general and specifically a mail server and info on Webmail.  

Webmail (and there a several webmail systems available) is really just 
some cgi scripts that access mailboxes using (normally) imap.

FreeBSD administrators often "roll their own" solutions. But there are 
several established combinations. For example, the author of the qmail 
mail server also wrote the ezmlm mailing list manager, and it makes 
sense to use them together. A company called Inter7 have added some 
tweaks to this setup with additional software called vpopmail (for 
managing virtual domains and users), qmailadmin for administrating 
e-mail accounts and mailing lists, and a webmail system (that I'm not 
personally very keen on) called Sqwebmail.

You might find it interesting to look over their site at:

http://www.inter7.com

Possibly more interesting webmail solutions could be horde and 
phpgroupware, both of which offer additional features such as calendars, 
to-do lists, and are easy to extend in different ways to suit your 
specific requirements.

Personally, I'd probably use qmail, ezmlm (or in fact a version of it 
called ezmlm-idx), vpopmail, qmailadmin, courier (for pop and imap 
servers) and either horde or phpgroupware.

If you go to:

http://www.freebsd.org/ports/index.html

you'll be able to read some info on all these pieces of software.

HTH

PWR.