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

[Nicholas Thomas]

Rob Hall wrote:
> 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
>   
Hey. You seem to have the MX settings corect; www.dnsstuff.com has a 
checker that looks at them for you, too. Note that for a production 
environment, you really should try to have a backup MX (or two... :D) 
running as well. Most good ISPs will offer them for free/a small charge.

If you're going to have quite low usage, then you might want to look at 
using "just courier" - it has fairly simple SMTP, IMAP, POP3, etc. 
daemons, and they all integrate quite nicely. Authentication is also 
quite slick, and there's even a web-based configuration frontend :)

/Nick