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

Configuration debugging


If this has all worked correctly—congratulations! You are well on the way to organizing your mail.

If it didn't quite work as expected, there are a number of simple things we can do to find out what the problem is.

Checking for typos in the scripts

As with any programming process, if at first it doesn't work, check the code to make sure that there were no obvious typos introduced during the editing phase.

Looking at the log file for error messages

If that doesn't highlight anything, you can look at the log file created by Procmail. In this case, the log file is called pmlog in the ~/Procmail directory. To look at just the last few lines, use the following command:

tail ~/Procmail/pmlog

In the following example there is a missing :0 so that the rule lines are being skipped:

* ^Subject:.*hello world
TEST-HelloWorld

This would give the following errors:

procmail: [10311] Mon Jun 8 18:21:34 2009
procmail: Skipped "* ^Subject:.* hello world"
procmail: Skipped "TEST"
procmail...