I'm trying to find some open source alternatives to PowerMTA - specifically a mail delivery backend that handles email delivery, inbound bounces & replies, reporting & load balancing.
I'm interested in building an open-source front end of top of one of these systems.
I haven't had much luck locating a suitable open source system. Does anyone have suggestions?
Thank you.
Have you looked at the industrial strength MTAs included in Debian / Ubuntu such as
Can you detail why these won't do? The Wikipedia Comparison of MTAs doesn't even list PowerMTA.
[Follow-up after OP's answer] I am not a mail-system specialist, but
Maybe you should try to have a chat with Linux mail admin. Good luck.
Hi Dirk,
Specifically I'm looking for an integrated solution that handles bounces, reporting, load balancing etc... all the requirements of a high-end enterprise system. We're not really interested in building all that infrastructure and would like to just be able to plug a fancy front-end into a battle tested high-load system.
Postfix, exim, qmail & sendmail only send the email messages. They don't handle integrated reporting, bounce management & reporting. Here's a list of the features PowerMTA offers http://www.port25.com/products/prod_features_basic.html ideally I'd like to find an open source system that handles a substantial number of those features.
Cheers, James
Sounds like you're looking for an all-inclusive system as you could combine several tools to build a suitable system for free using the normal open source tools as Dirk suggested.
I'm not sure if they have the reporting tools you're looking for but you could try
Hi zemaj:
PowerMTA is for the most part use for mailing company emails to mailing lists. My understanding is that PowerMTA built a very useful API to handle a few of the requirements that you have, like reporting, bouncing, and spam mgmt. As Dirk pointed out, I am almost certain that you are able to use postfix, exim or sendmail for any of those purposes. Because the later tools are open source you will most likely find open source plug-ins that will do the other part of the job.
For Example: in order to use postfix with some kind of bounce management you can use VERP process. And in order to do automatic subscription of lists, you could use phplist. Is a matter of diagramming what you need and then look how to solve each requirement.
I think a good SysAdmin will be able to point you to the right place.
Thanks and I hope you find the solution.
Geo
these are all crappy answers - there is no open source alternative - that I've ever seen.
Of course there is no open source alternative.
Open source is all about providing perfect building blocks. If you want a ready to use building, you should either build it or buy it.
Thus you face a very common problem: if you can't build it yourself, you need to choose if you pay to someone who can or buy something ready to use.
Ready to use means you can get it right now and start using it. But building it yourself means flexibility and a final result perfectly fitting your needs.
In this particualar case I don't see anything in Powermta feature list that can't be easily implemented in a system based upon any open source MTA.
And BTW, I am not sure Powermta is really able to monitor reputation, because in case of big ESP's like Yahoo or MSN it requires setting up feedback loops and the like. I think Powermta can only process defers, because this is what it can get from SMTP session. But in this case it's not very useful. If you get defers, it's already too late for reputation.
This demonstrates perfectly that basically professional email server is one of the things that must be open source based because it needs so much flexibility that integrated solution never can provide.