ideal deployment for email server

Richard,

This will depend entirely on what your specifications are. If you wanted stability, for example, I would choose CentOS. Although, CentOS is considerably more challenging to manage and administrate than say Debian or Ubuntu, where user experience is better and administration is easier.

Either way, Debian is a good choice for a stable server. Then again, the distribution won't really matter much. It's the configurations that will likely cause instability… Unless you're using Arch or another rolling distribution and you decide to update constantly.

Thanks,

Dave.

@drussell:

Although, CentOS is considerably more challenging to manage and administrate than say Debian or Ubuntu, where user experience is better and administration is easier.
That's a personal opinion, and not fact. I find RedHat/CentOS easier to manage than Ubuntu, but that's because I'm used to the tools and file locations. I've also had less problems with CentOS with patching than I've had with Ubuntu (which has broken my install a couple of times).

Everyone has their own favourite distro. Pretty much any of the "long term" solutions (eg CentOS, Debian stable, Ubuntu LTS) should suffice; iredmail is supported on all 3 of them according to their download page ( http://www.iredmail.org/download.html ).

However it may make more sense to ask on a list or support forum dedicated to that product; if the OP needs help in configuring iredmail then using an OS that many people there use might have them supporting it easier :-)