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

Downloading and installing SpamAssassin


SpamAssassin is slightly different from most of the software that is used in this book. It is written in a language called Perl, which has its own distribution method called CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network). CPAN is a large website of Perl software (normally, Perl modules), and the term CPAN is also the name of the software used to download those modules and install them. Though SpamAssassin is provided as a package by many Linux distributions, we strongly recommend that you install it from source rather than use a package. This way, you will get the latest version of SpamAssassin rather than the one that was current when your Linux distributer created its release.

Most Perl users will build Perl modules using CPAN and experience no difficulties. CPAN can automatically locate and install any dependencies (other components that are required to make the desired component work properly). From a Perl point of view, using CPAN to install Perl modules...