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 6. Getting Started with Procmail

Procmail is a versatile e-mail filter that is typically used to process messages before they are delivered to a user's inbox.

This chapter includes the following topics:

  • A brief introduction to Procmail

  • The typical filtering tasks that can be performed by Procmail

  • How a mail filtering system can be installed and set up on the server to handle the repetitive sorting and storing tasks that you would rather not spend your time on every day

  • The basic structure of the rules and actions within a Procmail recipe

  • How to create and test the rules within our recipe

  • Finally, some example recipes to perform filtering

By the end of the chapter, you will understand the basics of the filtering process how to set up the system to perform filtering and how to perform a number of very simple but extremely useful filtering operations on your own mail. All of which will help you keep on top of all the mail you have already or will soon be receiving.

Introduction to Procmail...