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

Backing up users' e-mail


We will be using dump to backup the whole partition containing our mailboxes. The dump command copies files on a file system to a specified disk, tape, or other media.

Some of the reasons for using it are:

  • It is incredibly fast (in my tests, the network is the bottleneck)

  • It is simple (one command suffices)

  • It can run unattended (for example, as cron job)

  • It does not need any additional software to be installed

  • It does not need a GUI

  • It is very mature having been around since AT&T UNIX Version 6, circa 1975

The restore command performs the opposite of dump. A backup of a file system taken using dump can be restored as the complete file system or you can selectively restore certain files or directories.

Mail storage

We recommend putting the mailboxes (/home) on a separate partition for many reasons.

  • File system maintenance can be performed independently from other parts of the system (simply unmount /home, perform an fsck, mount it again).

  • It is possible to put that...