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 Procmail


Procmail is a mail filter that is executed after messages have arrived on the mail server but before final delivery to the intended recipient. The behavior of Procmail is controlled by a number of user written recipes (or scripts). Each recipe can contain a number of pattern matching rules to select messages based on at least, the recipient, the subject, and the message content. If the match criteria in a rule selects the message as a candidate, the recipe may perform a number of actions to move the message to a folder, reply to the sender, or even discard the message before delivery. As with the rules, actions are user written in the recipe and can perform almost any operation on a message.

The Procmail home page is located at http://www.procmail.org.

Who wrote it and when

Version 1.0 was released in the late 1990's and has evolved to represent one of the best and most commonly used mail filtering solutions for UNIX-based mail systems. Procmail was originally designed...