Re: Best mail setup for home server?
On Sat, 05 May 2012 10:21:10 -0500 Joshua Isom articulated: I currently use my FreeBSD system as my generic unix server and some coding, along with occasional multimedia. I'd installed postfix years ago and kept using it. Right now, I use getmail with cron, dspam, and dovecot to handle my gmail account. I've never set up outgoing mail which makes changing email clients, or devices, annoying. Currently postfix is set to use dovecot's deliver command so that dovecot can sort and handle it. Before I deal with setting postfix to relay the mail, dealing with firewalls and other possible issues, is there a better alternative? I'd prefer that local mail just works even if I lose internet, and any email that gets as far as my server will at least eventually mail. The archlinux wiki seems to suggest ssmtp doesn't work properly with attachments. Instead it recommends msmtp, which requires an active internet connection to use. Dragonfly's dma is local only to the computer and not the LAN. Are the only options configuring sendmail or configuring postfix? If you only have a dynamic IP, you might want to investigate something like: http://dyn.com/; or a similar service. Attempting to send mail from a dynamic IP will usually result in it being marked as Spam and discarded or just being outright refused by an up-line MTA. Personally, I would stick with Postfix, obviously the latest version. It is far easier to configure than Sendmail and you can actually speak with its author if a problem arises. -- Jerry ♔ Disclaimer: off-list followups get on-list replies or get ignored. Please do not ignore the Reply-To header. __ The Wright Brothers weren't the first to fly. They were just the first not to crash. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Best mail setup for home server?
--As of May 5, 2012 10:21:10 AM -0500, Joshua Isom is alleged to have said: I currently use my FreeBSD system as my generic unix server and some coding, along with occasional multimedia. I'd installed postfix years ago and kept using it. Right now, I use getmail with cron, dspam, and dovecot to handle my gmail account. I've never set up outgoing mail which makes changing email clients, or devices, annoying. Currently postfix is set to use dovecot's deliver command so that dovecot can sort and handle it. Before I deal with setting postfix to relay the mail, dealing with firewalls and other possible issues, is there a better alternative? I'd prefer that local mail just works even if I lose internet, and any email that gets as far as my server will at least eventually mail. --As for the rest, it is mine. I've been using Postfix for a decade to do basically this; no major problems, and it doesn't take much to set up. No reason to go to something else. (Even for speed: I've used it for work on a site handling millions of messages a day...) As has been said, a local resolver will help. The thing to watch for is what mail you'll let it accept: It's moderately easy to set it up as an open relay, which you *don't* want to do. Accept from the local network is fine; I've never needed to set up authenticated sending from outside that, though I keep meaning to when I have some free time... The dynamic IP problem can be a hassle, and lead to weird losses of mail. My solution has just been to call the ISP and get a 'business' line, with a static IP, though forwarding to their mail relay would work as well. Daniel T. Staal --- This email copyright the author. Unless otherwise noted, you are expressly allowed to retransmit, quote, or otherwise use the contents for non-commercial purposes. This copyright will expire 5 years after the author's death, or in 30 years, whichever is longer, unless such a period is in excess of local copyright law. --- ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Best mail setup for home server?
I currently use my FreeBSD system as my generic unix server and some coding, along with occasional multimedia. I'd installed postfix years ago and kept using it. Right now, I use getmail with cron, dspam, and dovecot to handle my gmail account. I've never set up outgoing mail which makes changing email clients, or devices, annoying. Currently postfix is set to use dovecot's deliver command so that dovecot can sort and handle it. Before I deal with setting postfix to relay the mail, dealing with firewalls and other possible issues, is there a better alternative? I'd prefer that local mail just works even if I lose internet, and any email that gets as far as my server will at least eventually mail. The archlinux wiki seems to suggest ssmtp doesn't work properly with attachments. Instead it recommends msmtp, which requires an active internet connection to use. Dragonfly's dma is local only to the computer and not the LAN. Are the only options configuring sendmail or configuring postfix? ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Best mail setup for home server?
On 05/05/2012 16:21, Joshua Isom wrote: I currently use my FreeBSD system as my generic unix server and some coding, along with occasional multimedia. I'd installed postfix years ago and kept using it. Right now, I use getmail with cron, dspam, and dovecot to handle my gmail account. I've never set up outgoing mail which makes changing email clients, or devices, annoying. Currently postfix is set to use dovecot's deliver command so that dovecot can sort and handle it. Before I deal with setting postfix to relay the mail, dealing with firewalls and other possible issues, is there a better alternative? I'd prefer that local mail just works even if I lose internet, and any email that gets as far as my server will at least eventually mail. The archlinux wiki seems to suggest ssmtp doesn't work properly with attachments. Instead it recommends msmtp, which requires an active internet connection to use. Dragonfly's dma is local only to the computer and not the LAN. Are the only options configuring sendmail or configuring postfix? Local mail will just work with postfix, but general mail may not work with the simpler servers like ssmtp or msmtp or dma. Given you've already got postfix installed and presumably have gained some familiarity with it over the time you've been using it, I can't see a good reason to switch to anything else. Any e-mail system will have problems if you lose internet connectivity: e-mail is critically dependent on the DNS, and if your MTA cannot lookup the data it needs, it is not going to get very far. Ideally it should just queue the mail to be dealt with as soon as connectivity improves -- a good MTA like postfix should do this as standard, although you might find it a good idea to run an instance of named as a local recursive resolver. There are some alternative MTAs to postfix (such as sendmail or exim), but given this is for personal use and presumably won't be handling all that much e-mail in any case, any of them would do the job admirably, and you main criterion for choosing which to use should be which one you know best. Cheers, Matthew -- Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Best mail setup for home server?
On 05/05/2012 17:21, Joshua Isom wrote: Before I deal with setting postfix to relay the mail, dealing with firewalls and other possible issues, is there a better alternative? postfix will do the job, it just works, local mail will continue to just work. There are alternatives like qmail and sendmail, but why bother if you're already familiar with postfix? The issues you will have will likely be the same regardless of your choice of MTA: Relaying mail through your server may cause outgoing mail to end up in recipients spambox, that at least if your MTA will send directly to the recipient mail server and not relay through, say, your google account. I don't know if you can set postfix up to relay through gmail using your google account, or if it is a good idea - you have to configure it with your password and in plaintext I suppose. But, is this the solution? It sounds like you've got an overly complicated setup. If you use a mail client you can configure multiple accounts, download messages for offline use etc. A mail client like Thunderbird will queue your mail if the smtp server cannot be reached. Consider the issues you otherwise will have when you're away and can't reach your server. BR, Erik -- M: +34 666 334 818 T: +34 915 211 157 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Best mail setup for home server?
On Sat, 05 May 2012 10:21:10 -0500, Joshua Isom wrote: I currently use my FreeBSD system as my generic unix server and some coding, along with occasional multimedia. I'd installed postfix years ago and kept using it. Right now, I use getmail with cron, dspam, and dovecot to handle my gmail account. I've never set up outgoing mail which makes changing email clients, or devices, annoying. Currently postfix is set to use dovecot's deliver command so that dovecot can sort and handle it. Before I deal with setting postfix to relay the mail, dealing with firewalls and other possible issues, is there a better alternative? I'd prefer that local mail just works even if I lose internet, and any email that gets as far as my server will at least eventually mail. The archlinux wiki seems to suggest ssmtp doesn't work properly with attachments. Instead it recommends msmtp, which requires an active internet connection to use. Dragonfly's dma is local only to the computer and not the LAN. Are the only options configuring sendmail or configuring postfix? As it has been explained already, home _server_ in regards of e-mail makes certain assumption on what you _should_ do. Since dynamic IPs have become the main source of spam (and spam the main amount of e-mails transferred), sending from a dynmic IP might fail due to mail servers refusing to talk to your box. Furthermore, connection might drop is also a bad idea for a server. If problems in mail transmission occur on the way, notifications will be addressed to your server, and if it's currently not reachable, a problem for the other mail server arises, maybe even in blacklisting your machine. I've had a comparable solution when I was at university, behind a static IP: directly sending mail was no problem, and for receiving I did use fetchmail. That combination made me fully independent in choice of MUAs (and when paying attention to local storage formats, they all could work on the same mail data). I've been using an external server for actually hosting the mailbox (emptied by POP), so _that_ functionality (receiving messages on my _own_ system) was not in my scope at that time. However, with proper masquerading _any_ MUA could send to localhost, and even ls /some/stuff | mail -s stuff b...@example.com was possible. After moving, I only had dynamic IP, resulting in the observation that my setup didn't work for _some_ targets anymore, as they refused to accept messages from dynamic IPs. So I reconfigured sendmail to just send the messages to my ISP's MX. That mail relay _has_ a static IP. The downside: You won't be able to control the arrival of your messages; only successfully transmitted to relay will be in the logs. You can see advantages and disadvantages in this approach: local storage, requirement for permanent and reversable connection (proper DNS records highly suggested!) and being tied to ISP's MX. Maybe you should rething your operations ideas with the suggestions given on the list. There are some things to consider, but what you're basically planning is possible without much trouble, as long as you pay attention to the protocol. :-) -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ... ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
