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 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 in 1998 under the name VMailer. It is written in C and currently consists of about 105,000 lines of code (comments excluded), which makes it fairly small. It works on most non-historic variants of UNIX and Linux.

As a pure mail transfer agent, Postfix does not provide any service for allowing users to collect their mail via the POP or IMAP protocols. That task must be carried out by some other piece of software. The software discussed in this book for facilitating retrieval of mail from the host is Courier IMAP.

All official Postfix documentation, as well as the source code and links to third-party software and archives of the very active mailing list can be found at the Postfix website...