Chapter 8. Mail Services

The technologies within Mac OS X Panther Server that provide Mail services have been substantially upgraded from previous versions. In fact, once again Apple has leveraged solutions available from the open-source community to provide entirely different yet altogether more robust Mail services. Although the Server Admin tool provides a unified interface for configuring services, Panther Server uses a variety of interconnected but separate processes to provide a total mail solution. The segregated nature of the Mail service is a reflection of the separate protocols required to facilitate electronic mail transfers.

The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is used to send outgoing mail from client to server and from one server to another server; Mac OS X Server uses the Postfix process to provide SMTP services. Clients receive incoming mail from their server via either the Post Office Protocol (POP) or the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP); Mac OS X Server uses the Cyrus process to provide POP and IMAP services. Other optional services provide ancillary mail features: Mac OS X Server includes the SquirrelMail process to provide Web sitebased mail access and Mailman scripts to provide mailing list services.

These items are open-source solutions with many configuration options that go well beyond the scope of the Server Admin tool and this book. You can visit their Web sites for more information: http://www.postfix.org/, http://ags.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/, http://www.squirrelmail.org/, and http://www.list.org/.