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

Introduction to ClamSMTP


In order to scan all e-mail passing through the server, a software interface is required between Postfix and ClamAV. The interface we are going to use is ClamSMTP. The following introduction from the ClamSMTP site (http://memberwebs.com/stef/software/clamsmtp/) describes the SMTP virus filter as:

ClamSMTP is an SMTP filter that allows you to check for viruses using the ClamAV antivirus software. It accepts SMTP connections and forwards the SMTP commands and responses to another SMTP server. The 'DATA' email body is intercepted and scanned before forwarding. ClamSMTP aims to be lightweight, reliable, and simple rather than have a myriad of options. It's written in C without major dependencies.

Postfix is designed to allow external filters to be called to process mail messages and to return the processed data back to Postfix for onward delivery. ClamSMTP has been designed to work directly between Postfix and ClamAV to ensure efficient operation.

Some Linux distributions...