Earlier this week I wrote about using sSMTP as a simple way to send email from a system. The goal I had in mind was being notified when my web server is under a lot of load or goes down.

When the need arises to send email from the command line, many folks first think of the mail(1) command.

The Postal project includes three programs aimed at benchmarking mail server performance. The main program, postal, sends email messages to a specified list of destination addresses at a specified rate. Postal can let you see how fast your system can process incoming email and thus can help you measure improvements to your mail server when you are making software and hardware changes.

This is a detailed description about how to set up a Fedora 8 server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc.

When you start doing it though, you soon find out that the hardest, or at least lest documented task, is not how to send email, or how to block spam. It is how to make sure that the email you send is always accepted by other sites, that is how to find out if your email server looks like a spam source.

This tutorial will explain how to run a mail server with virtual domains and users using a MySQL backend to store email informations.
Postfix will be our SMTP server, Dovecot will be handling IMAP (optionally one could configure POP3 also) so that users can retrieve their email.

Having a notification when new email arrives can be nice and really useful if you're waiting for an important message. But if you're using a desktop email client or maybe a third party webmail service, you might not want to run a big client application or have to keep checking that tab in Firefox to see if new mail has arrived.

YPOPs! is an application that provides POP3 and SMTP access to Yahoo! Mail. This application is more like a gateway. It provides a POP3 server interface at o­ne end to talk to email clients and an HTTP client (browser) interface at the other which allows it to talk to Yahoo! The same concept holds good for SMTP as well.It works with all know email clients like Outlook, Thunderbird, Evolution, Eudora etc.

Everyone is not as lucky as having a full fletched email client like thunderbird or kmail to send mails. There is one unlucky group known as system administrators who have to send the mails either through the command line or a script running on the remote server.