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

Summary


In this chapter, we have explored Procmail to discover a large number of services and a large amount of functionality that it can provide to help with getting our mail under control. Using the advanced features of Procmail we have discovered:

  • The differences between delivering and non-delivering recipes

  • How to order each recipe to avoid slow delivery times

  • The use of Procmail variables and condition flags to control delivery

  • Using regular expressions for sophisticated pattern matching

  • The large number of available Procmail macros and their usage

  • And finally, a number of example recipes to manage our mail effectively

While we have covered a lot, there is still a lot to be learned and there are a large number of resources available on the Web dedicated to this one particular application.

Hopefully you will now have a strong grasp of the core functionality of Procmail, how to implement it, and also how to go about exploring your real-life needs, and creating recipe sets that you can combine...