Excellent automatic management system, excellent support, excellent online guides and excellent community forum. Claimed to be fairly fast compared to the alternatives, but from europe some slicehosted sites seem a bit slow. Rock stable.
If one receives messages about missing locales, run the following:
dpkg-reconfigure locales
/usr/sbin/update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8
... then check that all is well by running "locale".
The base package for all the mail articles will be postfix. There are, of course, alternatives to postfix, each with advantages and disadvantages and, without going into the differences, I have chosen postfix due its relative ease of configuration.
As many of the future articles will concentrate on administrative issues and assume postfix is already installed, let's go ahead and install it.