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

Advanced recipe analysis


Here we have a much more complicated recipe that implements a form of vacation service to inform senders that you are away and unable to reply to e-mails. At first thought this could be a simple non-delivering recipe to send a message back to all messages received. However, this is not ideal as some people may end up receiving multiple delivery confirmation messages and you may also end up sending messages back to system utilities that have no way of understanding your well-meant reply.

The example is based on the "vacation example" from the Procmail procmailex manual page.

The vacation.cache file is maintained by Formail. It maintains a vacation database by extracting the name of the sender and inserting it in the vacation.cache file. This ensures that it always contains the most recent names. The size of the file is limited to a maximum of approximately 8192 bytes. If the name of the sender is new, an auto reply will be sent.

The following recipe implements a vacation...