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

Creating and testing a rule


Procmail allows you to organize your rules and recipes into multiple files and then process each file in turn. This makes it much easier to manage the rules and also to switch rules on and off as the needs change. For this first test case, we will create a special rule set for testing and organize all our rules in a subdirectory of our home directory. Typically, the subdirectory is called Procmail but you are free to use your own name.

We will start off by looking at a simple personal rule and testing it for a single user. Later in the chapter, when we have covered all of the basics and you are comfortable with the process of creating and setting up rules, we will show how to start applying rules to all system users.

A "hello world" example

Almost all books on programming start off with a very simple "hello world" example to show the basics of the programming language. In this case, we will create a simple personal rule that processes all e-mails received by a user...