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A Short List of eMail Essentials.There are a few essentials required to set up an email server on the Internet. I mention them here as I don't want to mislead you into thinking that all you need is some software to get Internet email working. The other items required are:
If you want your email server to send and receive messages over the Internet, you will need a domain name. Something like MyDomain.com or Microsoft.com although I'm almost sure the latter is already taken. It costs about US$35 or CAN$50 per year to register a domain name on the Internet. You also need a static IP and a permanent connection to the Internet so that other mail servers can contact yours. That's not all that hard to obtain these days. Most ISP's that have cable or ADSL connections will rent you a static IP.
In addition to the domain name, and the static IP, you need someone with a name server that will host your domain zone file. That is the server that makes the connection between your domain name and the IP address. So when someone sends a message to you@yourdomain.com some SMTP server contacts a name server to find out where to send the mail for yourdomain.com. Most ISP's and sometimes even the registrar that you used to register your domain name will do this part for you. You can even run a name server yourself. If you're *not* connected to the Internet, you can use any name you want and use HOSTS files for name resolution. In this case you can skip the first two essentials listed above. See Example Three. While I mention these items here for completeness, the following instructions
deal mostly with setting up and configuring the email server software and not
how to register domain names, or configure name servers and zone files. |
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