Setting up a mail server

[killshot80]

Hello everyone,

I was wondering if anyone out there could point me to a website or something on how to start a mail server. I am using Redhat 7.0. Redhat.com does not have any information and all the other Linux websites give me stupid links that have nothing to do with mail servers. This is getting very frustrating not being able to find useful information anywhere. Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.

SL

 

[Guest_imported]

I Use Postfix

http://www.postfix.org

it was pretty simple to set up. And the system never goes down. I assume that you want a mail server to serve mail for domain, you will have to point the DNS to your IP, (must Be Static). and set the hosts in your /etc/hosts file

 

[killshot80]

Cool. Thanks for the tip.

SL

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

Redhat.com does have information but sometimes you need to know more specifically what to ask for first! By far the most widely used mailserver is sendmail -->

http://www.redhat.com/support/docs/howto/RH-sendmail-HOWTO/book1.html

. The only 'problem' with it is that you have to change the config as a two-stage process - firstly by editing the sendmail.mc (macro) file and then running that through the 'm4' macro preprocessor to create the sendmail.cf that sendmail itself actually uses.

Other than that, the most likely problem you may get with that or any other mailserver is that it is often necessary to set-up your server to masquerade as the server of your isp. This doesn't work 'out-of-the-box' for any of the smtp servers and must be configured manually. See -->

http://mail-abuse.org/dul/gateways.htm

for details. This is all because of measures taken by ISPs to stop relaying of mail - in the windows client world this is almost never a problem because those systems are setup to use the ISP's smtp server not one running on their own box.

With sendmail as an smtp server (MTA), you would ordinarily also have procmail as the Mail delivery Agent (MDA). This doesn't generally need any config - just install the rpm.

Apart from postfix as mentioned above, another one to look at is qmail -->

http://www.qmail.org/top.html

.

Regards

 

[stratcat]

Just another vote for Postfix.
It works nicely.