[CoLoCo] Mail Server (shouldn't be this hard)

Kevin Fries kfries at cctus.com
Fri Nov 9 16:17:38 GMT 2007


On Fri, 2007-11-09 at 10:51 -0500, Michael "TheZorch" Haney wrote:
> I haven't figured out how to do this yet either.  A friend of mine used 
> to work maintaining a Red Hat system for a company on a hosted server.  
> He used Qmail on that server.  Its a secure email server which requires 
> your client to use SSL security.  If Qmail is still around and in a 
> package compatible with Ubuntu I'd recommend using that.

It sounds as if the mail server is not the issue here, but general
overall knowledge is.

Any mail server should work just fine.  If any of them are different and
should probably be avoided by noobs its QMail... The mail server is
great, but built and maintained by a guy whose ego makes even uncle Bill
look humble.  So, he moves things into non-standard (sometimes better,
mostly just wrong) locations, and has no problem telling you that his
was is the only truly intelligent way of doing things.  Like I said, if
you are not extremely good dealing with mail servers, I would avoid
QMail.

In the past I have used Postfix, and continue to do so to this day.  It
just works, works like you expect, and is as secure and stable as
anything you can find.  Plus... its in the Ubuntu repositories.

The OPs real problem is that mail servers really need to be on fixed IP
addresses.  When they are not, then configuration gets a little weird.
If you have a fixed IP, you can have your upstream (i.e. ISP) route
easily to your server.  Without a fixed IP, it is generally easier to
pull email, rather than push it.  Its a technique I have not seen done
in quite a while, so excuse me if my memory is a little fuzzy.

To pull mail instead of pushing it, you need to use a program like
fetchmail to "fetch" all email from your ISP.  You probably want no mail
boxes up there, but instead just a single catchall account (no joe
account, not mark account, and no mary account, but you have an all
account configured as "catch all"... mail sent to joe at me.com,
mark at me.com, or mary at me.com end up in the all at me.com account).  You then
use fetchmail to retrieve the email and pass it to your local Postfix
server for internal processing and final delivery.  A quick search on
Google and I found someone doing this for a home Linux setup:

http://www.jennings.homelinux.net/mailserver_config.html

The other option is to use a dynamic DNS setup.  In this case, you run a
daemon on your local Linux mail server to always publish your current IP
address to a special server (no-ip, dyndns, etc).  Then setup your MX
record by name that is resolved by that DNS server.  This should route
to your mail server just like if it had a static IP.  There are numerous
problems with that setup, and rarely works as well as it seems like it
should.  But depending on your needs, could be a very viable solution.

Hope this helps

-- 
Kevin Fries
Senior Linux Engineer
Computer and Communications Technology, Inc
A Division of Japan Communications Inc.



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