In house email for students

[Duke5A]

I might have this in the wrong thread, but it seemed to be the most appropriate. I've been tasked with coming up with a solution for handing out email accounts for the students at my district. Options like LiveEDU and GMail have come up, but I'm trying to stay away from having yet another collection of users I have to maintain. It would be nice to have an in-house solution that could authenticate against AD for this, and automatically create/remove mailboxes as accounts change in AD. Mailbox quotas would also need to be enforceable. I use Squid for our internal proxy servers and have it setup authenticating to AD, so I'm relatively comfortable to a Linux CLI. Is there anything out there in open source land that can meet these requirements? I was thinking Sendmail, but I've got no practical experience in setting up a Linux mail server. Thanks everyone!

[plexer]

Ms and google provide single sign on integration for their email services

[glennda]

Zimbra has a free option - not 100% sure on the intergration with AD, but as mentioned above you can use AD auth with live @ edu

[Sylv3r]

We moved from Zimbra to Live@Edu for our student e-mail system. All accounts have been pulled from AD and we use FIM to integrate via AD. Theres not much info available to help get setup, but the Microsoft support is free and we used them to help us get all setup.

Only negative for us so far is that we dont currently use a password policy on our AD and to enable password sync the AD passwords need to be a minimum of 6 characters.

[CyberNerd]

Zimbra is a good option and we set that up with active directory account provisioning. We ran zimbra alongside MSexchange. We since moved to google apps - which does single sign on and is a lot easier to maintain than either google apps or exchange, plus you dont need any hardware.

[dhicks]

It would be nice to have an in-house solution that could authenticate against AD for this, and automatically create/remove mailboxes as accounts change in AD.

On my own system I have a Debian server joined to an Active Directory domain with Samba, which provides the AD integration part of things. After that you simply set up email on your server however you like - in my case I use fetchmail to periodically get my email from a POP account and place it in Linux's email system, then I use SquirrelMail as a front end to read it. I can rummage around my server and dig up any details you need, if you want. The above approach should work quite well alongside Google Mail - you can use Google's service to filter the spam out and handle actually receveing email but have all your email locally-stored on your own server so it doesn't suddenly dissapear one day.

[sukh]

As mentioned above Live@edu is intergrated, if you don't want a cloud solution then deploy Exch on prem.

[Patrickv]

Windows Servers has full support with their Microsoft Exchange server product regarding what you want.

[dhicks]

Windows Servers has full support with their Microsoft Exchange server product regarding what you want.

Yes, but you have to pay for it - email is really very simple to set up on a Linux server, I wouldn't introduce an Exchange server into an organisation that didn't already have one.

[cpjitservices]

Zimbra or some other Linux alternative (there is another but i forget the name) it has full active directory integration, it's something we are looking to implement here to get rid of exchange!!

Postfix! That's what it's called, which is also easily integrated into an active directory environment.

[p858snake]

If you are authing against AD, as to my understanding you will need the appropriate CALs for that, So you might want to check the cost of running Exchange vs that of a open source solution.

[CyberNerd]

If you are authing against AD, as to my understanding you will need the appropriate CALs for that, So you might want to check the cost of running Exchange vs that of a open source solution.

You'd only need the same server CALS that active directory itself requires - so it wouldn't cost any more at all.