Mail Transport Agent
This is the core application that actually transmits e-mail around between servers—applications like Exim, sendmail, Postfix, and qmail.
Mail User Agent
More commonly called an “e-mail client” or an “e-mail program.” An MUA is a program like Outlook or Thunderbird—it’s the thing you run on your computer that you send and receive e-mail with. E-mail is a standardized tool, and you can generally use whatever MUA makes you happy.
Mail Delivery Agent
Sandwiched in the middle between the MUA on your desktop and the MTA on the server is another application category: the MDA, or Mail Delivery Agent. The MDA gets messages from the mail server into the users’ inboxes, most commonly with the POP or IMAP mail protocols. Except under some very limited circumstances, an MTA isn’t going to do you much good without an MDA, so we’re going to be using Dovecot as our MDA.
- MTA: Postfix
- MDA: Dovecot. IMAP. (courier-imap is an alternative)
- MUA: Thunderbird
- SpamAssassin, to keep spam out of your inbox
- ClamAV, to filter out viruses
- Sieve, to set up mail filters and rules
- Roundcube, for webmail (squirrelmail is an alternative)
- PostgreSQL (or MySQL/MariaDB), for Roundcube’s database
- Nginx and PHP-FPM, to serve out Roundcube over the Web
% sudo pacman -S dovecot pam postfix
as root
groupadd vmail useradd -g vmail -d /home/vmailer -s /bin/false vmailer mkdir /home/vmailer chown vmailer:vmail /home/vmailer chmod -R 750 /home/vmailer echo "vmailer:_some_password_" | chpasswd
follow these instructions: