Mail Server Administration

Unfortunately, I have had some trouble with our mail server lately. However, fortunately, it will give me the chance to learn something about an area I know nothing about. Here are some questions I have:

1. Can anyone recommend a good online tutorial for administering a remote email server?

In addition, I have been using two commands lately to check out the mail queue (mailq) and to monitor the mail activity (tail -f maillog) but the output doesn't make much sense to me. In particular, the issue that is really bothering me, and the source of my next question, is that I see email addresses in the mail queue that don't even exist on any of our domains. Can anyone tell me why this is? For example here is some output from our mail queue:



In this example the following email addresses don't even exist:

mike@ourdomain.com
webmaster@ourdomain.com
infor@ourdomain.com
postmaster@ourdomain.com

Why are they in our mail queue? What does that data actually mean? Is there a way to view more details?

Any answers would be appreciated.

As always, thank you.

Piet

Depends very much on what mail server software you're running. The documentation / manual on the mail server's site is normally a good starting point.

Someone (probably a spammer) has sent email to an account that doesn't exist. Your mail server software will deal with this in due course.