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 7. Advanced Procmail

Now that we have got the basics of Procmail under our belt, we can move on and start putting together a more complete mail-handling system. The advanced techniques in this chapter are required only if you need a very specialized handling for your mail and are not needed for setting up a basic e-mail server. You may wish to skip this chapter and return to it once your server is fully configured and operational.

We will be using a number of more advanced Procmail capabilities in this chapter. This chapter will cover:

  • The differences between delivering and non-delivering recipes

  • The usage of variables, substitutions, and pseudo-variables in advanced recipes

  • Locking and the use of various flags to control execution

  • How conditions can be applied to test various parts of a message

  • Advanced actions to forward, save, or pass a message on to an external program for processing

  • An introduction to regular expressions

  • Using Procmail macros to simplify e-mail header analysis

  • Detailed...