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

Verifying restoration procedures


Even with the best planning in the world, things go wrong and always at the most inconvenient moment.

Taking a proactive approach to disaster recovery with good planning and practice will highlight any problems at an early stage before it is too late. Verifying the integrity of system backups is only really possible by restoring them and checking that the restored system is fully operational.

You should ask yourself questions such as, "What actions are necessary if the remote server fails?" Do you repair the backup server first or switch to another server to reduce the size of the window without backups? If the mail server fails, are you familiar with the restoration procedures? Is replacement hardware available at short notice, for example, on a Sunday?

There are many horror stories of administrators diligently taking backups only to find that when required the backups are useless because of a tape drive error or a minor syntax error in the backup script that...