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The diagram above doesn't even include reading email, but it's as simple as it gets (if you want to run an email server). You will need to learn to administer basics of all the systems in the diagram. We won't go in too much depth, only the minimum you need. But we will not (for example) go over every detail of Postfix, which on its own has a rather [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postfix_%28software%29#Architecture complex] [https://www.credativ.de/blog/postfix-architecture-overview diagram].
=== Terminology Services involved in email delivery ===
The terms MTA, MDA, MUA, LDA are not 100% well defined, because few of the related services are simple and do exactly one thing. There is overlap, so if you don't find the acronyms helpful - don't worry about them. But they can help organize your thoughts when trying to keep all this in your head.
** This is why it can happen that you sent your email successfully but it never makes it to your "Sent" folder - the second connection to your IMAP server is quite unrelated to the first connection to the SMTP server.
* Note that a DNS server is also involved - it's needed to retrieve the address of the email server responsible for email for a particular domain. This is done with the MX records we looked at in the DNS labs.
== Sample client setup ==
Eventually we're going to set up all those services, but to begin with we'll set up an email client to connect to a (hopefully) working server - the Seneca email server. This will be a good exercise with an email client.
Install Thunderbird on your host, and configure it like this:
