mail server questions
 

General questions from beginner :-)

^_^ mail server ^_^

can anyone explain general idea of how make E-mail accounts@domain.com for example info@example.com , feedback@example.com , support@example.com

can do this with mail service like SMTP or what ?
or create real accounts on the system ?

What is benefits of MTA MUA MDA ?
What diff between SMTP , POP3 , IMAP ?

I have ADSL with public ( real ) IP address , and i registered domain for my personal web site ,

I want create some email accounts like ftpadmin@mydomain.com , webadmin@mydomain.com info@mydomain.com( mydomain for example )

What is the way , suitable tutorials .......etc ?

Thanks in advance :-)

First, you ensure that DNS is setup for your domain. You need at minimum an A record pointing to your your IP plus an MX record. The MX record (Mail eXchange) governs where mail for a domain is sent.

Once you've done that (an given it time to propagate) then mail sent to accounts@domain.com, info@domain.com and anyNameAtAll@domain.com will arrive at your server. This mail will be sent by a remote SMTP server to an SMTP server (application) listening on port 25 on your server.

So you need to setup on your server an SMTP application to deal with this incoming mail. Common SMTP programs are Sendmail, Postfix and Exim. The configurations differs but the general idea is the same -- to deal with transferring mail (hence they are called mail transfer agents, or MTAs).

Which program your choose is up to you. Do some research on Sendmail, Postfix and Exim (and maybe others) and see what makes sense. Pick one and install it.

Then, in that program you configure your email addresses, e.g., accounts@domain.com. You might set it up to be a real user account, with disk storage space and a mailbox, or you might configure it to be simply a forwarder to another account -- myRealName@domain.com. (And then you'd setup myRealName@domain.com to be a real account with storage space).

The last step is to provide access to the mail stored on your server to clients. To do this you install and setup a POP3 and/or an IMAP server. Examples of this type of software are Courier IMAP and Dovecot. A POP3 server listens on port 110, and IMAP server on port 143. Your users them configure their email program (e.g., Outlook or Thunderbird) to connect to your server using either the POP3 or IMAP protocol to receive their mail.

That's the basics, hope it helps :)

This is quite a useful webpage for some basic mailserver information:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MailServer

If you are planning on running either Red Hat or CentOS with Postfix this site is an incredible place to start.

http://www.linuxmail.info/

This is another good one. It's targeted at OpenBSD but the concepts and configs are the same for Postfix.
http://www.kernel-panic.it/openbsd/mail/mail3.html

Hope this helps. If you have specific configuration questions ask.

--Chris