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

The webmail solution


A webmail solution is a program or a series of scripts that is run on a server, is accessible over the web, and provides access to e-mail functions similar to a conventional mail client. It is used by Yahoo! Mail, Microsoft Hotmail, Microsoft Outlook Web Access, and Gmail as the primary interface to their e-mail solutions. You may already be familiar with various forms of webmail.

Though we will be examining the SquirrelMail webmail solution specifically, the benefits and drawbacks of SquirrelMail apply to most webmail systems in the market. From this point of view, we will approach the issue from a general perspective, and then in detail for the SquirrelMail package.

The benefits

This section will focus on the advantages offered by installing and maintaining a webmail solution. As with any list, it is not entirely comprehensive. Many benefits will be specific to a particular case; it is important to carefully examine and consider how the following qualities impact your...