Setting Up a New Server to Send Email

I am in the proccess of moving off of shared hosting to a dedicated server for this site and a few others I maintain.  I am using Ubuntu 9.10 Server.  This is a learning process for me.  This is how I was able to configure my server to send email. 

I installed sendmail

$ sudo apt-get install sendmail

then run

$ sudo sendmailconfig

This will install sendmail on the server.

Once sendmail was installed I could send forms from my website, but it was very slow.  In troubleshooting this I found a very helpful post in this thread about how to speed up form submissions with sendmail.  A good explanation of why sendmail needs this can be found here.  The solution is to modify the hosts file(found at /etc/hosts), mine looks like this:

127.0.1.1 servername servername.localdomain loghost

You will need to replace the servername in the above with your hostname.  If you do not know what that is you can do:

$ hostname 

to find out. 

Hope this helps someone out.