Snow Leopard™ Server

Chapter 23. Mail Services

In This Chapter

• Introduction to mail service

• Planning mail service

• Mail service setup and configuration

• Managing and monitoring mail service

Mac OS X Snow Leopard's mail service provides standards-based email messaging with new support for push notifications, Mobile Access, and significantly faster performance and improved compatibility.

In 2003, Apple released Mac OS X 10.3 Panther Server by using the open-source Cyrus server for clients' inbound email service. In Snow Leopard Server, Apple now uses the Dovecot open-source project to provide clients with inbound email services.

The move to the new mail engine is based on Dovecot's performance, which Apple says is not just faster than mail services in Leopard Server but also eclipses high-end, enterprise-class mail servers, citing benchmarks that rate it as soundly outperforming the Sun Java Messaging Server. Dovecot also provides strict adherence to standard mail delivery protocols, enhanced scalability to handle more users, and better data reliability with new features, including automatic self-healing data corruption detection and repair.

Snow Leopard's mail services also include junk mail filtering by using SpamAssassin's message text analysis to rate the probability of a mail item being unsolicited junk to help users sort noise out of their mailboxes.

Virus detection and quarantine services are provided by ClamAV, which works to detect viruses and then either bounce infected messages back to the sender, delete ...