|
|
| |
| Introduction
| |
Email services on your Virtual Private Server are managed by the sendmail program, with various other
Email tools providing extended capabilities.
sendmail is a configurable, robust SMTP server that processes all incoming and outgoing messages on your
VPS v2. Any VPS v2 Users can send and receive e-mail messages with
sendmail, although in order to check or send Email from a remote client (such as Outlook or Eudora), the user must
also have POP or IMAP permissions.
| |
| Configuring sendmail
| |
The sendmail program on VPS v2 runs as a daemon (a program that is always running). When you make changes
to any of the sendmail configurations, you must restart sendmail to load the new settings into the daemon.
To restart sendmail, the root user must run the following command from the VPS shell.
# restart_sendmail
You can also change to the /etc/mail directory and use make restart. the make command can also
take stop or start to respectively stop or start the sendmail daemon.
| |
| Domains, aliases, and forwards
| |
When an Email message arrives on your VPS v2, sendmail checks the incoming domain and determines if it is either
a local domain, or an authorized relay domain. In addition to the VPS hostname (or primary domain), which is
always considered a local domain, you can have any number of local domains on your server. In order to be considered
local, you must have the domain listed in the /etc/mail/local-host-names file on your server. Once a domain
is determined to be local, sendmail checks the
virtusertable and then the
aliases to determine if there is any special
delivery conditions for the recipient address.
Once an Email recipient has been checked against the virtusertable for domain based delivery, the domain name
of the recipient is ignored by sendmail. The username, without the domain, is then checked against the
aliases, and finally delivered to the correct local user's mailbox.
Your VPS v2 can also be configured to relay Email messages for authorized domains. This allows you to use your VPS v2
as a secondary mail server. When an Email message arrives with a recipient domain that is listed in the
/etc/mail/relay-domains file, sendmail will try to deliver the message to the primary server. If the
primary server is unable to accept the mail, sendmail will hold the messages in a special queue, and will
deliver them to the primary mail server once the primary server is online again. This feature is especially useful to
companies using exchange servers, or who have limited network access to their primary mail server.
| |
| Mail Filtering and SPAM prevention
| |
In addition to recipient based mail routing, sendmail can be configured to filter or route messages based on
other elements of the message. The easiest way to do this is with
Procmail, an easy to configure mail filtering add-on.
You can also configure sendmail itself for filtering using the
M4 macro set.
While there are many possible reasons to filter mail, one of the most common uses is to
prevent SPAM (or UCE)
| |
| Other Popular Email Tools
| |
There are a number of additional e-mail tools that you can configure for your VPS v2. Some of the more popular ones
include Email list Managers,
Email message encryption, and
Email Automatic Reply.
| |
| Using Remote Mail Clients
| |
For VPS v2 users with Mail permissions, POP and IMAP compatible remote mail clients can be used to download and
send Email messages. For more information, see
Configuring Email Clients.
|
Toll Free 1-866-GSP-4400 • 1-301-464-9363 • service@gsp.com
Copyright © 1994-2016 GSP Services, Inc.
|