Apple Servers

Mac OS X Server combines the most robust technologies from the open source community in a comprehensive suite of easy-to-use mail services — so you can deliver standards-based email, manage mailing lists, filter spam and guard against viruses. Mac, Windows and Linux clients can use either IMAP or POP to retrieve mail and send it over SMTP. And with support for thousands of clients per server and no per-user licensing fee, these high-performance services offer cost savings to small organizations and large enterprises alike.

Standards-Based Mail

Mail services in Mac OS X Server take advantage of open standards, providing compatibility with your existing network infrastructure and with email clients on Mac, Windows and Linux platforms. Mac OS X Server uses Postfix as its SMTP mail transfer agent and Cyrus for IMAP and POP support. The high-performance Postfix mail server is easy to configure and highly secure. Developed by Carnegie Mellon, the open source Cyrus scales well to large enterprise systems. Mac OS X Server makes these powerful systems easy to use and manage through the Server Admin utility.

Protection against Junk Mail and Viruses

Mac OS X Server v10.4 includes SpamAssassin, a powerful junk mail filter that analyzes the text of each email and assigns it a probability rating for being junk mail — and then marks the mail as potential junk. Because SpamAssassin is adaptive, it can be trained, either manually or automatically, to distinguish junk mail from acceptable mail. Also new in Mac OS X Server v10.4 is ClamAV, which scans mail messages and attachments for viruses, automatically deleting the message or quarantining it to a specified directory on the server for further analysis.

Mailing Lists

Mac OS X Server provides a graphical user interface for Mailman, one of the most widely deployed listserv solutions. Mac OS X Server makes it easy to create and maintain lists, with a web-based interface for end users. In addition, you get robust features such as list archiving, content filtering and digest delivery options.

Web-Based Mail

Webmail allows you to extend your mail services, so users can access their email from any website hosted on your server. Apple’s Webmail uses SquirrelMail, an open source Webmail package written in PHP4, with support for SSL, MIME, address books and folder manipulation. Webmail pages render in pure HTML 4.0 — with no JavaScript required — for maximum compatibility across browsers.

Security

With SSL/TLS encryption for SMTP, POP and IMAP, Mac OS X Server can encrypt the data sent between the server and the mail client. This allows secure and confidential transport of mail messages and attachments within a network. For maximum security, SSL can be required for communication on any protocol, including SMTP, POP and IMAP. With easy administrative control over authentication levels and support for strong cryptographic authentication services, Mac OS X Server gives you the flexibility to fit authentication methods to the needs of your organization. It supports CRAM-MD5 and APOP; and Kerberos can be used for SMTP, IMAP and POP services.