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

Using POP3


As mentioned in the introduction, POP3 is typically used when e-mail is to be stored on a client computer. It is most often used when there is an intermittent connection to the e-mail server, for example, while using a dial-up line to access an e-mail account at an ISP. This approach has the advantage that the e-mail is always available to the client, who can work when not connected to the e-mail server. E-mails can be read, and replies created for, when the user is next on line.

The main disadvantage of using POP3 is that e-mail is generally only available on the client PC. If the client PC fails, or is stolen, the e-mail is lost, unless a backup has been made.

POP3 clients can be configured to keep e-mail on the POP3 server for other clients to access, but IMAP is more often used in this situation.

Configuring Courier-IMAP for POP3

The configuration files are located in /usr/lib/courier-imap/etc/courier-imap/, if Courier-IMAP was built from source. If you are using a packaged...