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

What to back up


The big question always associated with backups is, "What should we back up?"

There are many things that contribute to our final decision. Of course, we want to back up our server's configuration because it is essential to our server's functionality. But we also want to back up the users' data because it is a valuable asset to our business. Is there a company policy that says people may use e-mail for private communication? If there is, should we back up those messages as well?

We should only back up what we need to restore the system to a functional state. This saves space on the backup media and shortens the time required to perform a backup and restore if necessary.

After all, the space on any backup media is limited and thus precious. It is more important to back up all the users' mails than to have a complete backup of the /tmp directory. Also, the less data we back up, the less time is required to perform the backup, thus returning our system's resources (CPU cycles, I...