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I can heartily recommend postfix http://www.postfix.org/

It's a good idea to keep a logical separation between the sending MTA and the receiving MTA (separate hostnames at the least, separate machines/instances is best because you can manage security policy better).

Do plan on keeping the SMTP operations separate from the web application, and if your application is going to read email, plan on building spamfiltering in from the beginning.

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What do you mean when you say "keep the SMTP operations separate from the web application"? With a queue?

It's more about maintaining separation of concerns, back in the late '90s I dealt with a web app that was written as one massive perl CGI that was called from the webserver and from the web users .forward; it was ugly, buggy and if you added the right headers to your email you could do sql injections.

Run the mailreader as a separate user, have it talk to the data layer on it's own, basic informational hygiene.

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