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

Chapter 2. Setting up Postfix

The Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) is perhaps the most important part of a mail system. It is responsible for receiving messages from the Internet or from your own users and doing what it can to make sure that the messages arrive at their destinations—other mail servers or mailboxes of your users.

Postfix has been chosen as the mail transfer agent to be covered in this book. Postfix has a large feature set, it has an excellent security track record, it is fast, easy to configure, and under active development.

This book assumes that you are running Postfix 2.0 or later. Any feature or behavior of Postfix that is specific to releases later than 2.0 will be noted.

Introduction to Postfix

This first section gives a brief introduction to Postfix, how it works, and describes how its behavior can be controlled.

What is Postfix

Postfix is a modular mail transfer agent developed by IBM researcher Wietse Venema. It is free software and was released publicly for the first time...