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

Understanding e-mail structure


In order to make full use of the capabilities of Procmail, it is worth taking some time to understand the basic structure of a typical e-mail message. Over time, the structure has grown in complexity, but it can still be broken down into two discrete blocks.

Message body

The message body is separated from the headers by a single blank line (all the headers must be on consecutive lines, as any headers following a blank line will be assumed to be part of the message body).

The message body itself may be either a simple text message composed normally of simple ASCII characters or it may be a complex combination of parts encoded using something known as MIME. This has allowed e-mail to be able to transfer all forms of data ranging from simple text, HTML, or other formatted pages, and to include information such as attachments or embedded objects such as images. Discussion of MIME encoding is beyond the scope of this book, and is not necessary for most processes...