Linux System Administration

What’s Next

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For your mail server to receive mail, you’ll need to set up the incoming server with

DNS, as discussed in Chapter 3. As a brief reminder, you’ll use

MX records to do this.

A typical

MX record looks like this:

MX 10 server1.centralsoft.org.

This record says that email addressed to the domain centralsoft.org should be deliv-

ered to server1.centralsoft.org (which is the mail server for the domain).

What’s Next

At this point, you’ve installed and configured Postfix and an IMAP and POP3 ser-

vice. You have the essential components of a mail system you can use in a corporate

environment.

If this is your first exposure to mail, you may now understand why enterprises spend

large amounts of money to buy packaged systems licensed on a per-seat basis. You

may also understand why they hire a dozen or more system administrators to man-

age their email communication infrastructures. This area requires special expertise.

After you’ve mastered the information in this book, you may want to study more

components of advanced email systems. You should understand how to install and

configure a scalable and secure mail server and how much effort is required to gain

expertise in this area. You will also need an understanding of directory services such

as OpenLDAP or Fedora Directory Server to validate large numbers of users and pro-

vide a listing of mail users in your enterprise.

The next chapter discusses ...