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 e-mail filtering


Viruses, by definition, are things that we would prefer to avoid having any contact with at all. But in order to be certain that our filtering and detection processes are working correctly and that we are fully protected, we need to have access to a virus for testing purposes. Using real viruses for testing in the real world in a production ready environment is rather like setting fire to the trash can in your office to see whether the smoke detector is working. Such a test will give meaningful results, but with unappealing risks and unacceptable side effects. Therefore, we need our EICAR test file that can safely be mailed around and which is obviously non-viral, but which your antivirus software will react to as if it were a virus.

Testing mail-borne virus filtering

The first test is to check that you can still receive mail.

$ echo "Clean mail" | sendmail $USER

You should receive your mail with the addition of the following line in the header:

X-virus-scanned...