Email Service Design and Sample Configuration Files

Sample configurations and resources for: DNS, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, Amavis, SASL, Postfix, and IMAP/POP

An Email Tutorial and Study Guide

Prof. Pollock's email services lecture notes

HCC's email storage policies

Spammer Sentenced to Nine Years

Email troubleshooting story (funny)

See HEC Montréal: Deployment of a Large-Scale Mail Installation for a Linux Journal 2004 article on a large organization email service design and implementation, using Postfix.  “During a typical day, HEC Montréal receives over 125,000 e-mails ...  About 300,000 POP3 connections (from 5,500 different users) and 60,000 IMAP connections (from 5,000 different users) are initiated every day ...  Peaks of 225 concurrent IMAP connections and 50 concurrent POP3 connections frequently are encountered.”


Email software and Information Links

Courier-IMAP

Cyrus IMAP Server

ExchangeMail Open Source Backends for Unix/Linux

The IMAP Connection

Postfix Home

Sendmail Home

SquirrelMail - Webmail for Nuts!

Apache Web Server

ntp.org: Home of the Network Time Protocol

RFC 1939: Post Office Protocol - Version 3

RFC 2821: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol

RFC 3501: Internet Message Access Protocol - Version 4rev1


DNS Related Links

Sender Policy Framework

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record lookup - MXToolBox

DNS Reports

DNS Stuff: DNS tools, WHOIS, tracert, ping, and other network tools.

RFC 2606, Reserved Top Level DNS Names


Spam, Virus, and Security Related Links

The Rise of Reputations in the Fight Against Spam @ LinuxWorld (article from LinuxWorld Magazine)

Aspen (SPF reputation system)

DomainKeys (Yahoo reputation system)

GOSSiP (Reputation system)

AMaViS - A Mail Virus Scanner

ClamAV Project

SpamAssassin Home

Vipul's Razor

eicar - European Institute for Computer Anti-Virus Research

CAcert Inc.: The Free Community Digital Certificate Authority

Filtering Spam With Postfix article (from Free Software Magazine)

GreyListing.org

Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS)

RFC 1321, The MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm

SASL: Simple Authentication and Security Layer (Cyrus)

RFC 2222, Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL)

TLS Configuration for Postfix and Cyrus-imapd

Postfix + SASL How-To     (See also Quick Certs at the same site)


Sample Configuration Files

Email Setup session typescript on Fedora

/etc/hosts

/etc/resolv.conf

/etc/sysconfig/network

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0


/etc/named.conf (for wpserver)

/etc/named.conf

/var/named/gcaw.zone

/var/named/gcaw-rev.zone


/etc/sysconfig/iptables

/etc/hosts.allow

/etc/hosts.deny


/etc/amavisd.conf

/etc/logrotate.d/amavisd

~/.spamassassin/user_prefs.cf

/etc/logrotate.d/clamav

/etc/logrotate.d/freshclam

/etc/clamd.conf

/etc/freshclam.conf

/etc/cron.daily/freshclam

/etc/dovecot.conf - Basic Changes (diff) including Maildir Support

/etc/imapd.conf


/etc/postfix/main.cf

/etc/postfix/main.cf - Basic Changes (diff) including Maildir Support

/etc/postfix/master.cf

/etc/postfix/relocated

/etc/postfix/aliases (or /etc/aliases)

/etc/postfix/virtual

[postfix-policy for SPF checking]


sample-spam.txt

sample-spam2.txt

/etc/yum.conf

/etc/cyrus.conf

Apache (httpd) Configuration

/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf - Basic Changes (diff)

squirrelmail.conf (Apache Squirrelmail config file, in /etc/httpd/conf.d/)