I'm setting up a server at my house (it will move, but I'm doing the setup here). It's running Fedora 5 and currently I've got apache configured with php and tomcat working well, and the bugzilla software is installing nicely.

I'm wondering how to set up some kind of mail sending, however. I've never done this, and sendmail is currently running on this box (though it's not been configured). I also apparently have postfix 2.2 on here, though it's neither been configured nor is it running at the moment.

I have some basic questions before I ask for some pointers to some good tutorials for getting either of these set up correctly.

My only goal is to have bugzilla and some scripts from the server be able to send e-mails to either myself or other clients. What I use to do that is entirely irrelevant to me at the moment.

So, first question: Do I need to have a real internet domain name to be able to do this? The site I'm running this from will be www.ralinventions.com (check it out if you like, nice graphics), so will I need this box to have a domain name like "registration.ralinventions.com" or something that's registered to be able to send and receive mail on it?

Second question: The box /will/ eventually have a registered name (as it's going to be a server), but is there a way to test without that? (another flavor of that question might be: How do I set this up to test without having to physically move the box to the final location / IP address?)

<edit> Another question ... can I use the domain I already have (ralinventions) in any way in the configuration to have e-mail sent from /that/ site / domain (some kind of forwarding or something ... I really have no idea, but thought I'd throw it out there as an option) </edit>

Like I said, I'm extremely new to this part of it, so any help is greatly appreciated.

This document is a great introduction to setting up a small server with Fedora:

http://www.brennan.id.au/index.html

It covers the default sendmail, although I would personally either use Postfix, or "outsource" the problem. At about $30 a year a mailbox for a professional service like Fastmail it may not be particularly cost-effective to maintain your own mail service (even if mail administration is your day job! ).

Email is actually slightly complex, and if you are interested in learning I would recommend reading up a bit before diving in - any book on Linux system administration will probably have a chapter on email. You are asking reasonable questions, but answering them all requires explaining how email works and how it interacts with DNS. Which would require a *really* long post .

If you get stuck on specific issues then feel free to post questions - plenty of people struggle with mail and BIND the first time around.

Anyway, good luck!