Hi.

I have been reading and setting my linode up for 4 days.

I am a website developer and need mail for my clients.

I have yum installed postfix, postfixadmin, dovecot spamassasin.

I now need to set it up so it uses the mysql db postfixadmin uses, I have tried to follow all the tutorials but completely lost, one then said to check that postfix allows to use mysql and apparently the default centos postfix install doesnt you have to manually install it!?!?!?

What is the easiest(automated even better) way of setting up a pop/smtp/imap mail server, either with centos or any distro i dont care.

I thought setting up bind/apache and writing the script to sort that out was hard but i cant afford the time to now spend days trying to set email up.

There's a couple HOWTOs in the Linode Library on the topic of mail server configuration:

http://library.linode.com/email/postfix/

Most HOWTOs tend to be written for Ubuntu and Debian, since they are rather similar to each other and make up about 75% of Linode deployments. The instructions probably won't port to CentOS very well, but if you wish to stick with CentOS, they might provide some general idea of where to go.

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Unless you want to also be a email administrator your best bet is to farm it out to Google Apps.

Spam control is pretty much out of control unless you like to tinker with it daily - if you don't like to tinker (or like most people don't have that type of spare time), let the well paid engineers at Google worry about it.

Do make sure to check with your clients if its ok for their data to be exported to external services... they may be compromised with the Data Protection Act in the UK for example if their data is exported abroad without stating this.

http://www.spamtips.org/
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman ... assin-news
I disagree. If you only follow my blog and newsletter you can have a spam filter that generally is better (and safer!) than GMail, and you will see when configuration changes are recommended.

Use Google Apps. It will be up and running in 10 minutes. It will be constantly improved by the vast resources of Google.

It is seamless. The address to log in will be: mail.yourdomain.com. You can put your own logo and color scheme on it. It's free.

I started out setting up my own email server. It is a nightmare. I spent countless days and months trying to get delivery working to Yahoo and Aol. In the end I couldn't. Not because of anything I did, but because they would not "whitelist" my IP address.

If you need to send bulk email, Amazon recently introduced the SES service. It is amazingly cheap.

Trust me with this one. Spend 10 minutes and set up Google Apps. If you find you don't like it, you can always roll your own.