In this 3-article series we will discuss how to set up a Postfix mail server with antivirus and spam protection in a CentOS 7 box. Please note these instructions also works on other distributions such as RHEL/Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu.
Our plan consists in storing email accounts and aliases in a MariaDB database which is for our convenience, will be managed through phpMyAdmin.
If you choose to not install phpMyAdmin, or are dealing with a CLI-only server, we will also provide the equivalent code to create the database tables that will be used throughout this series.
Since keeping a mail server up and running is one of the essentials tasks that are usually assigned to system administrators and engineers, we will also provide a few tips to efficiently run this critical service in a production environment.
Create A and MX Records for Domain in DNS
Before proceeding further, there are a few prerequisites that must be met:
1. You will need a valid domain registered through a domain registrar. In this series we will use
www.linuxnewz.com, which was registered through GoDaddy.
2. Such domain must be pointed to the external IP of your VPS or cloud hosting provider. If you are self-hosting your mail server, you can use the service offered by FreeDNS (requires registration).
In any event, you have to set up
A and MX records for your domain as well (you can learn more about MX records in this FAQ from Google).
Once added, you can look them up using an online tool such as MxToolbox or ViewDNS to ensure they are properly set up.
Important: Please note that it may take a while (1-2 days) until the DNS records are propagated and your domain is available. In the meanwhile, you can access your VPS through its IP address to perform the tasks indicated below.
3. Configure the FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) of your VPS:
to set the system hostname, then edit /etc/hosts as follows (replace AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD, yourhostname, and yourdomain with the public IP of your server, your hostname, and your registered domain):
where yourhostname is the system hostname that was set previously using hostnamectl command.
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