Providing the range of mail-related services expected by organizations can be a confusing, daunting process. Pro Open Source Mail: Building an Enterprise Mail Solution presents a comprehensive guide to managing the most important e-mail services, including user administration, mail transfer agents, remote e-mail access, virus protection, spam and e-mail filtering, web-based e-mail, and mailing list maintenance.

Beginning with installation and configuration of the popular server-based operating system Fedora Core, the book outlines the system and network preparation process geared towards running a complete enterprise e-mail system. Subsequent chapters cover installation and configuration of sendmail, the popular POP3/IMAP server Dovecot, and ClamAV and SpamAssassin for virus protection and spam filtering. With a nod to the global e-mail availability now required by many organizations, this book also guides you through configuration of a web-based mail interface, mailing-list software, and advanced security and privacy topics.

Something as ubiquitous as e-mail can be taken for granted so easily. You may curse it, but as soon as “the server goes down,” you can’t stop from trying to check your e-mail twice as often until it is available again. Every Linux distribution comes with a mail server application. Perhaps you’re already running a small e-mail system for your home network, personal domain, or a larger organization, but you want to take that service a notch or two or three higher.

In this book, I take my experience as a professional systems and network administrator and offer a design for a complete enterprise-quality e-mail system. I take away the difficulty of choosing which software to use for the project, and provide a blueprint of sorts you can follow to build an e-mail system any organization would be proud to use. Certainly I encourage you to take the skills and knowledge learned from this book and expand upon them. Possibilities are nearly limitless, and you should not feel constrained by any means.

The software featured in this book represents what I feel to be the best of breed of open source software. Administrators have come to depend on these components and entrust the successful delivery and filtering of countless e-mail messages through e-mail systems built with these components. I hope you get a sense of my enthusiasm for Linux and open source software, particularly the applications discussed in this book. Indeed, I hope you will come to find that there is little reason to pay big money for software to provide enterprise-quality e-mail service.