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

Automating update of virus data


ClamAV is provided by volunteers, and the servers and bandwidth that are used to enable the software and virus database to be distributed are voluntarily funded. As such, it is important to ensure that there is a balance between the frequency of checking for updates to maintain an up-to-date database and overloading the various servers.

Note

The ClamAV group recommends the following: If you are running ClamAV 0.8x or higher, you can check for database updates as often as four times per hour provided you have the following option in freshclam.conf: DNSDatabaseInfo current.cvd.clamav.net.

If you don't have that option, you must stick with one check per hour.

Setting up auto updating

The virus database files for ClamAV can be downloaded from the ClamAV servers in a variety of ways. This includes using automated or manual tools such as wget. However, this is not the preferred way of doing the updates.

The freshclam utility we installed earlier with ClamAV is the...