Book Image

Linux Email

Book Image

Linux Email

Overview of this book

Many businesses want to run their email servers on Linux for greater control and flexibility of corporate communications, but getting started can be complicated. The attractiveness of a free-to-use and robust email service running on Linux can be undermined by the apparent technical challenges involved. Some of the complexity arises from the fact that an email server consists of several components that must be installed and configured separately, then integrated together. This book gives you just what you need to know to set up and maintain an email server. Unlike other approaches that deal with one component at a time, this book delivers a step-by-step approach across all the server components, leaving you with a complete working email server for your small business network. Starting with a discussion on why you should even consider hosting your own email server, the book covers setting up the mail server. We then move on to look at providing web access, so that users can access their email out of the office. After this we look at the features you'll want to add to improve email productivity: virus protection, spam detection, and automatic email processing. Finally we look at an essential maintenance task: backups. Written by professional Linux administrators, the book is aimed at technically confident users and new and part-time system administrators. The emphasis is on simple, practical and reliable guidance. Based entirely on free, Open Source software, this book will show you how to set up and manage your email server easily.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Linux E-mail
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface

Installation and basic configuration


In this section, we will take a look at how to obtain and install Postfix as well as how to make basic configuration changes. By the end of this section, you will be able to use Postfix to send and receive e-mail messages.

Choosing the Postfix version

There are two separate branches of Postfix development—the official release and the experimental release. The official release is sometimes referred to as the stable release, but that is somewhat misleading as it implies that the experimental release is unstable. That is not the case. The experimental release is used to introduce all new Postfix features. When the implementations of the features and their interfaces (for example, their configuration parameters) have stabilized sufficiently, they are brought into the official release. Normally, the only changes made to the official release are bug fixes and fixes for portability problems.

The experimental release is usable in production environments, but the...