Once an organization finds itself relying more and more on the timeliness and cleanliness of its inbound e-mail, it is time to introduce a centralized e-mail server into the infrastructure. There are many commercial solutions out there but in this article I will briefly describe how to build such a server out of purely Open Source Software (OSS).

The server, of course, will run Linux. (PBnJ Solutions uses RedHat but you can choose any distribution you prefer.) The stock server install will get you all the sendmail pieces you need but just to be sure, look for the

/usr/share/sendmail-cf

Our sendmail routing rules will make use of procmail for final delivery by way of the SpamAssassin spam filtering routines, but prior to that, all e-mail will be inspected for viruses using Virge. Virge can be configured to use a number of different virus signature checking tools, our preference currently being the TrendMicro set. So the other two tools you need then are the trophie daemon which acts as an interface between virge and the TrendMicro scanning engine library (Look for the section headlined InterScan Messaging Security Suite.)

To stay current, regular downloads of the signature file are required. TrendMicro's website publishes these here.

For more details on how to write your sendmail routing scripts, set the appropriate file ownership on the various libraries and daemons and finally configure a secure imap server to read the e-mail store, please read on...