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

Choosing between POP and IMAP


Postfix will receive e-mail and deliver it to the user's inbox, but additional software is required to allow users to read their e-mail with ease. There are two standards for retrieval of e-mail from a host. The first is called Post Office Protocol (POP). POP3 is the most commonly used version of POP. This is normally used to download e-mail from the server, store it in a client application, and remove the e-mail from the server. This is often used by Internet Service Providers. The e-mail is subsequently manipulated by the client application, for example, Windows Live Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird.

The second protocol is called Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP).The IMAP system is usually used when you want a copy of each e-mail to stay on the server. IMAP allows users to create folders for e-mail and to move or copy e-mail between the folders. The client application accesses the e-mail on the server, but does not have to store it on the client machine...