Using Mac OS X Lion Server

Conclusion

Apple’s servers have been doing mail since long before the advent of Mac OS X. Over the years, the mail services get more and more mature with each passing revision. While built on solid foundations, the mail service is a breeze to configure and the long-term care and feeding of the services should be minimal. However, before you deploy a Lion mail server, first make sure that all of the steps we laid out first are performed. These included making sure the DNS was set up properly, configuring the web service (if you will be using WebMail), setting up users and hopefully filtering mail before it gets to the server using one of the options provided earlier in this chapter.

The backend of each service is open source, meaning that thousands of servers around the world use the same technologies that Apple uses in Lion Server. These include RoundCube, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, Postfix, Amavis, and Dovecot. But you don’t need to know how to manage each of these individually. Instead, you can use Server Admin to maintain the mail service, which combines all of these in one easy to use interface.

Now that we’ve covered most of the standard services that are common to many server platforms, we’ll turn our attention in Chapter 7 to a service that is interesting and very functional for anyone looking to create video content and unique in Lion Server: Podcast Producer.