On 10/09/18 22:30, Craig Skinner wrote: > On Sat, 8 Sep 2018 11:23:35 -0400 Ken M wrote: >> Just curious how many of you use openbsd to run your own personal >> email server? Do you find it a hassle to manage in any way? > Being a postmaster (email server administrator) and hostmaster (DNS > server administrator) is fun, hectic, and takes about 5 years to learn.
I can certainly vouch for that. Okay, so far 100% of my production mail server work has been on Linux with various MTAs (sendmail, qmail, qmail+qpsmtpd, postfix). My journey started in 2001: my high school introduced a policy where by they wanted to inspect *all* email traffic sent from their school. In those days, everyone there had email addresses with the various webmail providers. None of these providers did https, and all of them had pissy email quotas. (Yahoo was 10MB back then, and that was one of the better ones! Gmail didn't exist. It's scary to think people send emails now that are many multiples of such quotas.) Thus I threw Slackware 8 on an old box, learned how to get sendmail working, and got Horde webmail going. Our home ADSL had a static IP, and I got a freebie dynamic DNS hostname linked to it. The machine ran 3 2GB SCSI HDDs in a software mirror-RAID. I had over 1GB free for mail. Went to school the next day, typed the address in, noted Netscape showed the padlock (after warning about a self-signed certificate), then I clicked the padlock to check out the security: AES-256. Crack that! Impersonating the self-signed certificate was a possibility, as was using remote desktop software on the workstation; that's about the limit of what they could do. I think the latter would be a more likely scenario than the former. I continue to run a server¹ today because I now have a *lot* of email dating back over 15 years. I could jettison this of course, or make a read-only archive of it for later perusal, but as it happens, having my own server means I can experiment with ideas and techniques which I can then apply to the servers at my workplace. Thus, it qualifies as "self training" (and a tax deduction). If you do have such a responsibility, then it might be worthwhile looking into how to set up such a mail server, working out how to do shared folders/public folders, spam filtering, etc. It's hard to go wrong with postfix+dovecot, and OpenSMTPD actually looks quite solid though I've not tried it myself as a primary MX. Otherwise, there is wisdom in just outsourcing this to whatever free-mail provider and just enjoy life. -- Stuart Longland (aka Redhatter, VK4MSL) I haven't lost my mind... ...it's backed up on a tape somewhere. 1. well, used to be just one server… I think they're breeding: https://hackaday.io/project/10529-solar-powered-cloud-computing
