Desktop Email

BSDJOE

BSDJOE

In your opinion what is the simplest setup for creating my own email server? I'm not to terribly worried about security as I treat unencrypted email as a postcard that anyone is free to read. What I want to accomplish.

1. have an email like joebsd@anything.* (insert whatever is easiest)
2. be able to send and receive email without gmail.
3. Index mail for search

I know there are many ways to do this so I'm looking for your experiences and recommendation for software and services. I'm not necessarily asking for a step by step just the pieces to start with and will do my own research to glue them together. Thank you in advance for any suggestions. :)

PS. I'm using FreeBSD 9.2.
 
Security is not just about others reading your mail, it includes making sure your server can't be used to spam or flood others.

You'll need
  • a static IP address or dynamic DNS
  • port 25 open through your ISP
  • a domain name
  • an MTA like Sendmail or Postfix
 
Possibly. Both have had security incidents. Postfix was designed to be secure, Sendmail in the last decade or so has not been bad, either. Postfix is supposed to be easier to configure, probably a good enough reason to choose it.
 
Properly configuring a MTA is hard, and requires quite a bit of knowledge, don't underestimate the difficulty.
If you're going to use this are your primary mail account, think carefully if you really want to do this, because chances are that at some point you will:
1) Lose mails
2) Be flooded with spam

I started running my own MTA when I was 17, and both have happened to me. It wasn't fun. On the plus side, I learned a lot, and 10 years later I was managing email services for thousands of people as a living...
Nowadays, I just use an online mail provider for my personal mail, it's so much easier and works just as well or better.

One in-between possibility to start with, is using a forward address. Use a `real' email service (like gmail) & address, and forward all email to your `own' email address, this way you'll benefit from gmail's spam protection, and you will always have a backup at gmail.

What you want to prevent above all is setting up an open relay, this will make your machine a spam-sending machine, which is obviously not good, and may get your email address blacklisted (which is also not good).
There are a number of online tools to test if you're running an open relay; be sure to use them!

You'll also need more than a MTA (Such as postfix), you'll also need an IMAP server (dovecot is standard these days, good software) and an anti-spam solution (SpamAssassin is pretty much the go-to answer, although I really dislike it, I haven't found anything better).

Good luck!
 
BSDJOE said:
In your opinion what is the simplest setup for creating my own email server? I'm not to terribly worried about security as I treat unencrypted email as a postcard that anyone is free to read. What I want to accomplish.

1. have an email like joebsd@anything.* (insert whatever is easiest)
2. be able to send and receive email without gmail.
3. Index mail for search

I know there are many ways to do this so I'm looking for your experiences and recommendation for software and services. I'm not necessarily asking for a step by step just the pieces to start with and will do my own research to glue them together. Thank you in advance for any suggestions. :)

PS. I'm using FreeBSD 9.2.
Click to expand...

Postfix is a more secure and simpler option than Sendmail, add Dovecot to the equation and you can have your own mail server up and running in ~30 minutes. You need a domain name; you can get free subdomains from freedns.afraid.org and if you don't have a static IP from your ISP, either request (and pay for) one or use one of the available IP update clients.

This guide will help you establish a basic MTA. It's perfectly suitable for SOHO solutions, but for larger deployments you would want to use an SQL database for virtual users and consider using SpamAssassin with Clam AV. However, not advertising your email address is the most effective spam prophylactic.
 
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