[My apologies if this is considered off-topic; this is a one-off posting]

I would like to announce the availability of a preview release of "Linnet". Linnet is a pre-compiled, pre-configured and ready-to-run mail server bundle, comprising courier-authlib, courier-imap, sqwebmail, exim, apache, openldap, openssl and ruby. It also contains a simple command-line interface for installation, stopping and starting daemons, and updating userdb entries.

Linnet can get user data from either userdb or an LDAP database, or both. It supports clustering using the 'mailhost' attribute for directing incoming SMTP/POP3/IMAP connections to the correct machine in a cluster.

It is designed to be easy to install and risk-free to upgrade. Multiple versions can be installed at once and you can switch back and forth instantly between them. Key libraries are included in the bundle (in particular, openssl, openldap and Berkeley db), minimising dependencies on the underlying O/S. Config files in Sam Varshavchik's sysconftool format allow automatic merging of settings when updating.

Linnet builds from original source tarballs using ruby scripts; I have also released binary builds for FreeBSD 4, FreeBSD 5 and Linux.

Homepage: http://linnet.rubyforge.org/ Documentation: http://linnet.rubyforge.org/handbook/book.html

The documentation is very incomplete at present but should give enough information for anyone who is interested to try it out. Please send feedback via the mailing lists: http://rubyforge.org/mail/?group_id=575

Regards,