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

Analyzing a simple rule


Let us assume that we are receiving large amounts of mail from a particular mail group that we subscribed to. The mail is interesting, but isn't important and we would prefer to read it at our leisure. The subject is "mythical monsters" and all e-mail arriving from this mailing list has a "To" address of . We have decided that we will create a special folder just for these items of mail, and copy all the mail into this folder. This is a simple rule that you will be able to easily copy and modify to process your own mail in the future.

The rule structure

The following is an example copy of a very simple .procmail file taken from a user's home directory and is intended to explain some of the basic features of a Procmail configuration. The rule itself is designed to store all mail sent to a certain e-mail address, , in a special folder called monsters. Most mail will be sent to multiple people including yourself...