[ubuntu-uk] Setting up mailserver

[Matthew Wild]

On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 6:44 PM, Josh Holland <jshholland at googlemail.com> wrote:
> I just bought a VPS hosting with the intention of setting up a mail
> address for myself at jrh at jrh.co.uk . AFAICT, this involves setting up a
> nameserver, which could also be run off the same VPS. Looking at the
> community docs, to run a name server I need to register a domain name
> for some extortionate price. Is there any way to bypass this, or am I on
> completely the wrong track? (btw it is a BitFolk bottom spec hosting
> running Hardy)
>

Without a domain name other mail servers have no way of locating your
VPS among all the other servers on the internet. jrh.co.uk, as with
probably all short domains, is already registered (you can type in a
console to check: whois jrh.co.uk). For what it's worth though,
domains aren't that extortionately-priced, especially .co.uk's
(usually £10 for 2 years).

My VPS provider, Bytemark, has their own nameservers for use by
customers, so I haven't bothered setting one up myself. I don't know
about other hosts though.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Postfix is a starter on installing
postfix, one of the most common mail servers. At the bottom are links
to other guides - Postfix will only handle the sending and receiving
of mail... if you want to read the mail it has received to your
mailbox, you will usually want to set up a POP/IMAP server also (the
alternative is ssh'ing to the VPS to read your mails there).

Hope this helps,
Matthew.