Email was the first “killer app” of the early Internet and today millions of emails are sent every day using a variety of emails servers such as postfix and sendmail. This section looks at how to use and configure email servers for sending and receiving email, mail filtering with services such as maildrop and procmail, and POP and IMAP servers such as Courier IMAP and Dovecot.
I have compiled a list of email providers here that support POP3 mail access on port 110 and IMAP mail access on 143, and also the big free webmail providers that do not just to round things off. If you know of any other reliable providers please add a comment or email me.
There are a number of exim commands to see what’s in the mail queue etc; sometimes you need to be able to see what’s in the queue by domain, to see where hold ups might be.
I changed the mail server on one of my machines from Postfix to Exim a couple of days ago and discovered it adds a "sender" header by default if the "from" header is not the same as the user that sent the email. This results in the "on behalf of" sort of from address in Outlook. This post looks at the setting to prevent the extra sender header from being added.
To check what is currently sitting in the sendmail mail queue use the sendmail -bp command or its alias mailq. This post looks at basic usage of this command and the output from viewing the mail queue.
The exim mail server has a number of command line options including being able to see what’s currently in the mail queue. Last week I looked at how to flush the exim mail queue and in this post look at how to view the exim mail queue.
logwatch is a daily process for reporting and analyzing log files and I recently started getting errors on one of the CentOS Linux machines I manage and no daily report. The particular machine gets thousands of bounced emails per day and the mail log files get very large. logwatch had been reporting to me every single bounced email message so the report emails had got very large before stopping altogether. This post looks at the error messages I got and what I did to fix the problem.