[YLUG] Query about MX records and setting up a new mailserver

[Rob Hall]

Hi there,

My first big Linux project and I'm dead excited by the prospect of
getting my teeth stuck into it.

We have been asked to set up a Virtual Learning Environment, websites,
user space and a mailserver for our college. For various reasons, the
decision was taken to host the websites and webspace and a store for
resources for the VLE on a Windows server and the mailserver and the VLE
itself (Moodle) is to be a Linux box. These have been leased from 1and1.

A domain has been created (lets call it foo.net) and this is currently
hosted on the Windows server. I want to now set up mail server so that
email addressed to user at foo.net is handled by the Linux box.

Here's where I come a little confused. I have created a subdomain called
mail.foo.net 

Would I now modify the A record of mail.foo.net to point at the IP
address of my Linux server and then modify the MX record of foo.net to
point to the FQDN of mail.foo.net so that I can send email to
user at foo.net

That seems vaguely logical to me but could someone advise?

I'm also thinking of using Dovecot and Squirrelmail to achieve my needs
on the Linux server - we don't need anything fancy like shared calendars
or any of that malarkey so a simple POP3/SMTP server will do us nicely.
Any comments? 

This is being hosted on a FC6 based machine and I'm quite happy with FC
which helps!

TIA

Rob Hall