thus Firas Kraiem spake:
Greetings, people :)
This is not really an OBSD-specific question but since the machine I plan to
do this on is running OBSD, I figured out I would post here, please don't
throw pointing objects at me ;)
So, here's the deal, I have a few machines behind a NAT gateway (router/modem
provided by my ISP) and I have a no-ip.org domain for it - can't afford
a "real" domain name at the moment. One of those is an OpenBSD (4.1) system
which I've been happily running an Apache/PHP/MySQL and a FTP server on for a
few months.
Now, what I would like to do, just for the fun and hopefully to learn a few
things in the process, is whether it would be possible to setup a mail server
on it so people can send me mail at [EMAIL PROTECTED], and if so, I'd much
appreciate if someone could point me to a few nice tutorials to set this up -
I've already googled for that and tried a few howto's but without much
success.
Firas
hi,
although this is not a typical topic for [EMAIL PROTECTED]
first, you have to get yourself the skills to set up a MTA (mail
transfer agent) such as sendmail (included in OpenBSD base system), or
postfix (packages/ports), or exim...
IMHO, you should take 'the hard way' and learn sendmail; it's not as
hard as it seems, there are pretty good tutorials on the web, OpenBSD's
documentation is awesome, and it has a decent license. If you need quick
results and get it up and running very fast, have a look at postfix
(license sucks) or exim.
second, you need a POP3 and/or IMAP4 server; there's a bunch of them
(packages/ports, again) like dovecot, cyrus, etc. for me, cyrus works
like a charm for many many years now, it's very efficient (i still run a
mail server -- sendmail/cyrus, some anti-spam procedures -- in an art
gallery with about 15 employees; believe it or not, it handles their
email traffic without problems and feels smooth and quick being based on
a 68040/40 Amiga 1200 :) and in active development. your favorite search
engine will provide you information how to set it up and how to
interoperate with sendmail, postfix, ...
third, you have to get some knowledge about the appropriate DNS entries
(the MX entry for your domain, even when using DynIP services) you have
to set. again, there's tutorials on the net.
four, please take into account that sending from your own mail server
being in a dynamically assigned IP range is a bad idea because most RBLs
(realtime blackhole lists, used by other MTAs to check whether your MTA
is likely to be a spammer or not, etc) list those IP ranges as very
likely to be a spam source. so, if possible, use your ISPs mail server
for relaying (as a 'smart host' in sendmail speak), or get yourself a
machine at a rack hoster; there are decent priced 'virtual root servers'
nowadays. (unfortunately, most of them are Linux machines; virtual root
means that you're put into a container, or 'jail' like environment,
where you are root and can set up that machine as you like; however, you
don't have 'full control' over the hardware, but this is not needed
anyways.)
HTH,
timo
