Mail server not working with Postfix Dovecot

[David Fletcher]

On Mon, 2015-12-07 at 14:11 +0100, Petter Adsen wrote:
> On Mon, 07 Dec 2015 11:29:15 +0100
> iceblink <iceblink at seti.nl> wrote:
> 
> > On 2015-12-07 08:42, Petter Adsen wrote:
> > > Where is this machine - is it in your home or hosted somewhere? If
> > > in your home, that is not ideal. Many (most?) ISPs block common
> > > ports for incoming SMTP traffic for home customers, and a lot of
> > > mail servers out there will not accept mail from a ISP home
> > > consumer IP range. You *will* have problems getting your mail
> > > delivered. I suspect this is what you are doing, and that is part
> > > of why you are having problems.  
> > 
> > This is probably different for each country. Here in the Netherlands 
> > most ISP's will not block any port (at least not until they find that 
> > your PC is sending spam or has an open relay mail server). The
> > biggest challenge in my country is getting a fixed IP address, or
> > failing that: keeping your DNS up to date with the changing IP
> > addresses.
> 
> That might well be. My point was that running a mail server on a
> regular home connection is not the best way to do it, and is generally
> advised against. For some ISP's it can also be considered a violation
> of terms of service.

Before I learned how to get my email sent directly to my server, I was
using fetchmail on the server as a cron job to download automatically
with POP and chuck everything at postfix. This works but is a bit naff
and nowhere as cool. The POP method has its uses though and I still use
it (these days with getmail) in addition to direct delivery to download
from a yahoo account and put everything from the local free cycle list
through procmail which diverts a whole load of stuff I'm never going to
be interested in straight into /null.

The POP/cron method might be a way for the OP to run a server if he
really can't get incoming SMTP packets.

Potentially stupid/obvious question:- Has the OP edited his MX record to
redirect email to his own network?

To deal with the dynamic IP address problem I run the noip client on the
server.

Dave