Install Postfix Mail Server with Dovecot and Squirrelmail on CentOS/RHEL

A commonly used Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) is postfix and this is the default MTA of RHEL. The key benefits are Easy to control, Secure and Faster MTA

Prerequirements

In order to install postfix you need to remove the other MTA’s

[root@myserver ~]# yum install postfix -y

Configuring Postfix

Open Postfix config file /etc/postfix/main.cf and find and edit the following lines

## Line no 75 – Uncomment and set your mail server FQDN ##

myhostname = server.myserver.com

## Line 83 – Uncomment and Set domain name ##

mydomain = myserver.com

## Line 99 – Uncomment ##

myorigin = $mydomain

## Line 116 – Set ipv4 ##

inet_interfaces = all

## Line 119 – Change to all ##

inet_protocols = all

## Line 164 – Comment ##

#mydestination = $myhostname, localhost.$mydomain, localhost,

## Line 165 – Uncomment ##

mydestination = $myhostname, localhost.$mydomain, localhost, $mydomain

## Line 264 – Uncomment and add IP range ##

mynetworks = 192.168.1.0/24, 127.0.0.0/8

## Line 419 – Uncomment ##

home_mailbox = Maildir

Don’t forget to save the files before exit. Now you can start your postfix service.

[root@myserver ~]# /etc/init.d/postfix start

[root@myserver ~]# /etc/init.d/postfix status master (pid  1290) is running…

[root@myserver ~]# chkconfig postfix on

Now you can test your postfix server. Access the server via telnet and enter the commands shown in cots, First we need to create a test user called “bharath”

[root@myserver ~]# useradd bharath

[root@myserver ~]# passwd bharath

[root@myserver ~]# telnet localhost smtp

Trying ::1…

Connected to localhost.

Escape character is ‘^]’.

220 server.myserver.com ESMTP Postfix

“ehlo localhost”

250-server.myserver.com

250-PIPELINING

250-SIZE 10240000

250-VRFY

250-ETRN

250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES

250-8BITMIME

250 DSN

“mail from:<bharath>”

250 2.1.0 Ok

“rcpt to:<bharath>”

250 2.1.5 Ok

“data”

354 End data with <CR><LF>.<CR><LF>

“welcome to myserver mail system”

“.”

250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as 3E68E284C

“quit”

221 2.0.0 Bye

Connection closed by foreign host.

That's it.