

Configuring a mail server with Postfix (ebook, in progress) - senko
http://gogs.info/2011/04/free-ebook-on-configuring-a-mail-server-with-postfix/

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senko
Although the conventional wisdom of the day seems to be it's better/easier to
outsource your mail servers, setting up one yourself is not hard, if you're
not handling huge amounts of mail and already have a system you can put your
MX on.

~~~
Travis
There are definitely reasons to run your own mail server. However, I've found
(in my 7 years as a linux sysadmin/dev) that email is one of the harder
services to setup, compared to http, database, etc.

It's the only service I use a GUI for to administer. Something about having to
compile the aliases, and I get confused with the spamassasin settings.

~~~
gog
What GUI are you using?

Compiling aliases? I guess you are not using virtual domains and sql storage?

If there was one GUI for configuration and management of every service
mentioned in the book would you consider switching and paying a small fee for
such a tool?

~~~
Travis
I had an old mac server, so I use Apple's gui. TBH, I don't even know if its
sendmail or postfix under the hood.

Never even got started using virtual domains. I just run emails for one
domain, so it never sounded like I should setup the virtual ones.

I can't envision a situation where I would really need to do anything
sophisticated with an email server, when I wouldn't just use google apps. I
can do the basic "send and receive" email from my server, and I was able to
let my gmail send through that (removing the "on behalf of" header).

But other than that I'm probably a hosted email guy all the way. I've never
spent any money on email stuff or been focused on it, so I don't have any feel
for costs.

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thinkbohemian
The Horror, the horror!!! I did this a few years ago and it was super painful,
so ebook would be great!!

While it is very easy to find services that will send your email for you it is
imho difficult to find services that will allow you to send and receive bulk
email. When you give users of your service custom email addresses, you can
start to do really cool things, like have users reply back to comments via
email.

~~~
SageRaven
Tell me about it. I wanted to move a client of mine from a dedicated box to a
cheaper, more powerful VPS. They have a monthly newsletter with about 17k
subscribers (opt-in, managed by a list server package).

I inquired about their policy, and they pretty much treated me like I was
found under a rock. In spite of us running a clean site (I showed the the URL
for the newsletter page, and our clean multi-RBL lookup), and they still
wanted me to agree to this BS terms-of-service page with such unreasonable
terms I dropped the entire idea.

Which is a shame, since the current provider really sucks, from a support
perspective, but they've never been unreasonable about, you know, using the
internet to send mail to a bunch of people at once.

Between this attitude and rabid mail admins with unreasonable RBL policies
(like flat-out rejecting a message for being listed on only 1 of ~40 or so
public RBLs -- one that demands money for immediate delisting), I've witnessed
a slow Balkanization of the internet over the years.

~~~
gog
That's true. That is a reason I do not allow sending out mass emails from the
main mail servers IP address. You never know who will be trigger happy.

If for some reason bulk mailing providers do not suit you it cheaper to have a
separate machine/IP address for sending such emails than having to deal with
important emails not coming through because somebody blacklisted your IP
address although he subscribed to the mailing list.

------
devmach
Good stuff. There is also workaround.org's ISPmail tutorials :
<http://workaround.org/ispmail>

~~~
gog
Those are also nice. But I always find something missing in the available
tutorials. Sometimes it's vacation auto reply, sometimes DKIM signing, etc...

And of course the tutorial for Debian Squeeze is not yet available.

Disclosure: I am the author of the book this link points to.

~~~
devmach
kudos for the book. I really liked it. Will/Could you add a section for
Dovecot also?

~~~
gog
Thank you.

I don't believe I will be doing a Dovecot chapter anytime soon, for the
reasons I stated at the beginning of <http://gogs.info/books/debian-
mail/chunked/courier.html>

But, I must admit, I really like Dovecots Sieve filtering.

I do plan to publish the books Docbook sources on Github, hopefully someone
who has more experience with Dovecot would be interested in contributing.

~~~
sc68cal
I run dovecot on my FreeBSD box. I'd be happy to contribute a fork on Github.
You can find me on github with the same handle.

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chuhnk
I'll be interested to see what information within this ebook more relevant or
upto date than something like "Postfix the definitive guide" from the O'Reilly
series. When I configured my first mail server it was all very cryptic but
then I had very little sysadmin experience at the time. I honestly feel
postfix is very easy to setup and its the main reason I chose it over other
mail servers like exim, qmail or sendmail. I only became aware of the added
performance bonus after running bulk mailing at 1 million emails per hour.

