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

Basic operations


When a mail item arrives and is passed to the Procmail program, the sequence of operations follows a set format. It starts by loading the various configuration files to obtain the rules that have been set up for that particular user. The message is then tested by each of these rules in turn and when a suitable match is made, the rule is applied. Some rules terminate when they have completed, while others return control so that the message can be assessed against remaining rules for potential processing.

Configuration file

The system-wide configuration is normally made in /etc/procmailrc, while personal configuration files are normally stored in the user's home directory and called .procmailrc. Individual rules can be stored in separate files or grouped together into a number of files and then included as part of the mail filtering process by the main .procmailrc file. Typically these files would be stored in the Procmail subdirectory of your home directory.

File format

Entries...