[CentOS] Use postfix and spamd on CentOS 6 - looking for a shortest guide

Wed Aug 13 19:14:40 UTC 2014
Ned Slider <ned at unixmail.co.uk>

On 13/08/14 17:32, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> BC wrote:
> 
>>> I've never seen a 1-page document that said,
>>> "These are the changes I made after downloading packages X, Y and Z."
> 
>> There is a large chasm between configuring a mail server and understanding
>> the configuration of a mail server. Due to the many pitfalls and custom
>> environments, it is very difficult to have a 1-page document that does
>> much more than be an outbound MTA.
> 
> Note what I asked for.
> If you have installed postfix + spamassassin or whatever under CentOS
> then presumably you downloaded certain packages
> and then made certain changes in config files and perhaps elsewhere.
> Therefore it is possible to write a short document just listing
> the changes you have made.
> It may be a waste of time in your view;
> but in my experience this is exactly what I want to read
> for my very basic home server needs.
> 

Yes, I did exactly that for CentOS 5, and you can find it on the Wiki here:

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos#head-0facb50d5796bee0bd394636c32ffa9a997a6ab5

There's a basic Postfix/Dovecot guide:

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/postfix

It lists all the config changes required in Postfix and Dovecot for a
basic Postfix server (assumes networking knowledge).

Then you can add in some simple spam filtering with Postfix restrictions:

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/postfix_restrictions

or greylisting:

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/postgrey

or bolt on Amavisd/SpamAssassin:

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Amavisd

or bolt on some encryption with SASL and SSL/TLS

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/postfix_sasl

These guides were all designed to be fully functional and modular so you
could pick just the bits you wanted to extend your basic Postfix
installation.

There will be some config differences between el5 and el6 due to the
different versions of the packages used. If you can't figure out the
differences just go with the docs provided on el5 - it's supported for
another 3 years or so.

If you get it working on el6/el7 please feel free to fork the docs for
those dists. I know of at least one person running this setup on el6
with the extra packages from EPEL.

This really isn't that difficult. The Postfix docs are excellent. You
just need to spend a day reading (and understanding) the docs. The main
confusion seems to stem from the fact that there are so many different
ways to implement a solution and there is no right or wrong way to do
it. But this just illustrates the ultimate flexibility of the software
you are using.

The methods documented above illustrate one such approach. I (and
another contributor to this list) documented it for the wider community
as it's the method we use. If you don't like it feel free to use another
approach, but please don't complain that there isn't any documentation
when we worked really hard to develop those docs for the community.