Email server

Tillotson

I want people to be able to email me at my domain. I also want to be able to send emails from the same domain.

Currently the dmz server is running Debian 5.04. I can build a new virtual machine if that would be concidered much more secure.

I don't mind ssh'ing into the server to send and recieve mail.

What's the bare minimun I need to do to achieve this? Thanks

niallb

Have you your DNS records set up to point to this machine as your primary MX ?

Tillotson

Yes, I'm using dnsmasq on my firewall for this.

At least I think it's set up correctly, "dig $host MX" returns the proper address.

niallb

dnsmasq is a good place to start for a LAN only mail setup.
I actually meant DNS globally if you want to be able to receive mail from anyone else.
If you do

dig @resolver1.opendns.com $yourdomain MX

does it return the IP address of your public facing machine?

Tillotson

No,

I thought wrongly that I could just forward all incoming mail to a server like I did with http.

I'm using dyndns and it looks like this shouldn't be too much hassle to setup.

niallb

Actually, dyndns does support this in a way, but it'll be clumsy and unless you have a static IP, unreliable.
If you own your domain, and simply want a mail service attached to it,
a good place to start would be with Google hosted apps.
This will give you a control panel to set up users, take care of mail delivery
and give you your own private gmail at your own domain.

Go to www.google.com/a and look at "standard (free)" version.
Setting it up will give you a good introduction to how mail gets routed and has good guidance on how to make the changes needed to your domain's DNS records.

On the other hand, you could take your own server a little further if you want to study it.
You can choose from a number of mail servers to run your services.
You'll need an smtp server - exim, postfix, sendmail are popular - sendmail is tricky to configure if you haven't done it before. exim has a good reputation, and I feel that the posfix configuration is easy enough to read.
You might also choose to install an IMAP or POP server to allow you collect your mail.
If you're willing to ssh to the machine, you can skip this and read it directly using the
commandline 'mail' or my personal favourite 'alpine' which is a very powerful mail
client which is even compatible with gmail.

What is the most important thing you're trying to achieve?

Tillotson

Ugh the dyndns interface is a mess, finally found how to add a mx record. I don't know how this gets populated to other dns servers but I'm guessing it might take a while.

Will hosting my own mail be very unreliable? My IP address doesn't seem to change that much. Anyway the main objective has never been reliability.

Thanks for the info, I think I'll get to work on postfix.

Is spam going to be a huge problem? It seems like spam spamassassin and postgrey are the most effective anti-spam tools.

niallb

spamassassin will help - make sure it's up to date or it'll block current mail as being from too far in the future...
Your biggest issue is that you'll have a "dialup" IP address, and many places you try to deliver mail to will just ignore you. It's a blacklist which spamassassin uses too.
Have fun.