In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Postfix on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Postfix is a free and open-source MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) used for routing or delivering emails on a Linux system. By the default configuration it permits local mailing, however in itself it is very useful on a machine used by many customers, or even if there may be no such visitors, many services dump their reviews and messages into e-mails, which is introduced to the root consumer locally, so the sysadmin might be noticed on any activities when he/she logs in and switches to root user.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step install of the Postfix Mail on CentOS 8.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 8.
- It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues
- A
non-root sudo useror access to theroot user. We recommend acting as anon-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.
Install Postfix on CentOS 8
Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.
sudo dnf clean all sudo dnf update
Step 2. Installing Postfix on CentOS 8.
Run the following command to Install Postfix Mail Server:
sudo dnf install postfix
Upon successful installation of Postfix, start and enable Postfix service by running:
sudo systemctl start postfix sudo systemctl enable postfix
Step 3. Installing Mailx Email Client.
Now we install the Mailx email client package to check the email sent on your system by entering the following command:
sudo dnf install mailx
After installation, we can send an email to our local server. For example, we will send a test email to the system admin user ‘meilana.’ We will type the following command on the terminal to do so:
mail meilana
Hit enter. The system will ask to provide “Subject“. Then hit enter again and write the email body. After writing body, hit enter and type dot (.) & hit enter again to send mail.
To check whether the email has arrived at its destination, log in as root from the recipient side, and type ‘mail’ in the terminal:
Step 4. Configure Firewall.
If Firewalld is running, allow SMTP service. SMTP uses:
sudo firewall-cmd --add-service=smtp --permanent sudo firewall-cmd --reload
Congratulations! You have successfully installed Postfix. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Postfix Mail Server on CentOS 8 systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Postfix website.
