"Run Your Own Mail Server" by M.W.Lucas

degauss4 said:
released?
Click to expand...

Yes and no.

Published (printed) 28th September, apparently deliverable tomorrow:

1728014908870.png


(I'm not in Horsham. That's probably an ISP-oriented geoguess.)

Whether "in progress" means "No" for some things, I don't know:

1728015079510.png
 
bvdw78 said:
Nope, we're lucky to have Freedom Internet here (freedom.nl) which takes requests for rdns from residential customers and sets them up on both the IPv4 and IPv6 side of things for you. Shameless plug, I know, but they deserve it fair and square. I am, however, only hosting stuff from the VPS I rent. Having a residential/consumer IP block still runs you into blocklists from time to time when it comes to hosting mail.

The mainstream old telco dinosaur ISP doesn't do rdns for consumers, obviously. There are ways round that using GRE tunnels etc. but that's a whole different cookie.
Click to expand...
Freedom leased a new netblock some time ago and I got a new IP number. Turns out mail from my server at home is now refused by hotmail because that netblock apparently has a nasty reputation. Guys at Freedom told me to inform hotmail myself, but I really think it's up to them since this affects a whole netblock...
Anyway they know their shit, so your shameless plug is not too shameless imho. I'm quite happy with them too.

But I like running my own mailservers with mimedefang (including all the custom perl-dnsbl-shit I put into the filter), sa and sendmail. I remember Lucas explicitely stating in his Absolute BSD-handbook mailparagraph: "Don't use sendmail, use Postfix."
I never followed that advice, but I suppose it will be in this new book of his as well.

But I absolutely agree with his premise that it's wise to run your internetshit independently and for me that certainly includes mailhandling. I really needed his Freebsd-handbook some 20 years ago, but I'm afraid I'm gonna skip on this new one. :cool:
 
My ISP no longer provides incoming mailboxes, so I either have to sign up with gmail and the like or run my own MTA. In fact, I run 5!

One is on my small server machine (actually running FreeBSD on a 2-core atom), another is on my desktop machine (running PCLinuxOS). These are both used for incoming mail only. Then I have 3 tiny FreeBSD VMs one for each domain I have for outgoing mail. These relay through my ISP to avoid the blocklists, some of which block all IPs not allocated to ISP's recognised servers. The reason for having three outgoing servers is to apply the correct DKIM signature for each domain. That might not be the only way to do it but it works for my simple mind and the VMs don't take up much space as they only have 256MB RAM each. (I do have to remember to give them more when upgrading though.)

This works well using postfix, because it's what I'm used to. I do use greylisting but it's rarely needed (and not particularly useful as most spammers do set up SFP these days, as do most mail sources) and therefore causes little delay most of the time. I also use a number of blocklists which are definitely more useful and report anything that does get through to spamcop. There is one over-zealous blocklist I don't use because it lists Google and Microsoft servers, not recognising that a single spammer succeeding in using one of their servers does not invalidate their genuine users' mail. At present this system works well.

Yes, it can be done, but you do have to jump through all the security hoops to get mail through.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top