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

Testing SMTP AUTH


When you test SMTP authentication, don't use a regular mail client as the mail client may introduce some problems. Instead use the Telnet client program and connect to Postfix in an SMTP communication. You will need to send the username and password of your test user in a Base64-encoded form so the first step will be to create such a string. Use the following command to create a Base64 encoded string for the user test using the password testpass:

$ perl -MMIME::Base64 -e 'print encode_base64("test\0test\0testpass");'
dGVzdAB0ZXN0AHRlc3RwYXNz

Note

Note that the \0 separates the username from the password, and the username will have to be repeated twice. This is because SASL expects two, possibly different usernames (userid, authid) to support additional functionality that isn't used for SMTP authentication.

Also keep in mind that if your username or password contains the @ or $ characters you will need to escape them with a prepended \, or Perl will interpret them and this...