Linux Mail Server Setup and Howto Guide

Active Directory has a type of grouping called Distribution group used solely as an email distribution list. This page will show you how to use the distribution group as a mailing list for Postfix. But first, you need to upgrade Postfix to version 2.4 or higher. Download Postfix RPM Packages.

The Unix world has two ways of storing mail messages, the traditional mbox format and the newer maildir format. Postfix and Dovecot supports the two mail storage format so you can use any format, but I highly recommend you use the maildir format.

This page will show you how to join your Linux server into the Active Directory domain, how to integrate the Active Directory user accounts into the Linux user accounts and how to authenticate users in Active Directory using Winbind, a component of Samba.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and its derivative CentOS 4 includes a graphical tool called Security Level Configuration for configuring the firewall options. This guide describes how to use this tool to open up the ports necessary for providing an email server.

For more efficient virus scanning in MailScanner, we can use the Perl ClamAV Module. To do this, we need to install the required Perl modules. Here are the steps to do this.

1. In the Terminal window, type in the commands below.

perl -MCPAN -e shell

This will activate the interactive mode for locating, download and building perl modules from CPAN sites. CPAN stands for Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. CPAN sites contains a large collection of Perl softwares and documentations.

This article will guide you in configuring MailScanner, ClamAV and SpamAssassin to work in Postfix. Before proceeding, please make sure that all of the above components are already installed.

To install MailScanner, we are going to download the latest source code from the MailScanner web site and build it. For this to work, it needs the Development Tools package. If you did not include this during installation, you must add it now. Learn how to add or remove applications here.

To install Clam AntiVirus (ClamAV), we are going to use the precompiled binaries from Dag Wieers RPM packages for Red Hat, RHEL, CentOS and Fedora. To do this, we are going to configure Yum to look for the ClamAV packages in Dag’s repository.

In Linux, new user accounts automatically receive mail accounts. Here are the steps for adding new users in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 or CentOS 4.

SquirrelMail is an open source standards-based webmail package written in PHP. When installed, SquirrelMail is ready out of the box. All it needs is an installed web server like Apache, SMTP server like Postfix, and IMAP server like Dovecot.