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

Formail


Formail is an external utility program (from Procmail) that is nearly always available on systems where Procmail is installed. Its function is to process mail messages and extract information from within the headers of the messages. It acts as a filter that can be used to force mail into a format suitable for storing in a Linux mail system. It can also perform a number of other useful functions such as 'From' escaping, generating auto-replying headers, simple header extracting, or splitting up a mailbox/digest/articles file.

The input data mail/mailbox/article contents need to be provided using the standard input. Therefore, formail is ideally suited for use in pipeline command chains. Output data is provided on the standard output.

We are not going to go into the subtleties of formail in this chapter, but as it is a useful tool, we will make reference to some of its functionality in some of our examples. More information can be obtained from the system manual pages.