Setting Up Your Server

Before you can start sending your automated e-mail messages off to the universe, you'll need to ensure that your Linux system has an MTA package running and that it's configured correctly. This is no small task in itself, but fortunately, some Linux distributions provide some basic tools to help you out.

This section walks you through the basics of the two most popular e-mail MTA programs used in Linux: sendmail and Postfix. While there have been complete books written on properly configuring each of these packages, we'll just look at the basics to see how to get e-mails off the Linux system and into your Inbox.

sendmail

The sendmail MTA package is one of the most popular open source MTA packages used by Internet mail servers. In the past, it had been plagued with stories about backdoors and security flaws; however, it has been rewritten not only to remove the security flaws but also to incorporate many newer MTA features such as spam control. The newer versions of the sendmail program have proven to be secure as well as versatile.