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 9. Antivirus Protection

A common view is that Linux is not vulnerable to viruses, so why install an antivirus solution? While it is true that there are very few viruses for Linux, the primary objective is not to protect the mail server from infection, but to reduce or eliminate any risk to recipients. Your organization may have client PCs running Windows that are susceptible to viruses, or you could receive a virus laden e-mail that you may forward to a customer or business partner.

One of the many options for filtering with Procmail is to remove executable attachments from e-mails in order to protect your system from possible virus attacks. This will be, at best, a crude operation; at worst, it will remove files that do not contain viruses and possibly leave other infected documents such as scripts that are not executables.

It is also possible to scan e-mails on the client side. But in a company environment, it is not always possible to rely on every individual having their machines...