An Anti-Spam gateway #3: Postfix

(NOTE: this is part of the “An Anti-Spam gateway” series)

So, at last, we’re getting our hands dirty. It’s time to separate the boys from the men, or something.

Now, as I was writing this, I had a decision to make. Should this part, called “Postfix”, include all the Postfix-related instructions, which will produce a non-working, non-testable mail server until the rest of the stuff is installed? Or should this part have enough to create a standard gateway, not depending (yet) on SpamAssassin, ClamAV and the rest – and, only in THOSE parts, will the instructions for configuring Postfix to use them appear?

I’ve decided to do it the latter way. It’s important to be able to test each part of the gateway as you install it, instead of doing everything and only “turning it on” at the end, with a myriad possible points of failure.

So, to install Postfix: go to http://www.postfix.org/download.html, choose the closest mirror, and download the most recent stable version of Postfix (at this time, it’s 2.2 patchlevel 5, or 2.2.5). Uncompress it, enter its directory, and then…

AUXLIBS='-ldb' CCARGS='-DHAS_DB' OPT='-O2' DEBUG='' make
AUXLIBS='-ldb' CCARGS='-DHAS_DB' OPT='-O2' DEBUG='' make install

There, an installed Postfix. (accept the defaults at the end.) The configuration files are at /etc/postfix, so let’s go there and make a few changes to main.cf… in the next part, since this one is becoming too long.