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Mail-in-a-box: easy to set up modern SMTP/SMTPS server stack
111–120 of 150 posts
Re: Mail-in-a-box: easy to set up modern SMTP/SMTPS server stack
#112It remains a constant frustration to me that Postfix, Exim, Cyrus, Dovecot and the like still feel as if they belong very much in the "here be dragons" territories of the Unix world. Configuring these systems is an exercise in constant frustration and bafflement. They're such a pain to use that since becoming the sysadmin in charge of our work email servers, I gave up running personal ones as well and just pay FastMa…
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Re: Mail-in-a-box: easy to set up modern SMTP/SMTPS server stack
#113Be aware: Rackspace (and surely many other cloud server providers) intentionally submit their IP blocks to DNS blacklists to dissuade spammers from using their hosts to send/relay mail. I'm not sure if the other big players do this but it wouldn't surprise me. Same goes for most consumer-class cable modem ISPs.
I have an email server with Rackspace and haven't had any issues with delivery.
Re: Mail-in-a-box: easy to set up modern SMTP/SMTPS server stack
#114Thanks for doing this. setting up mail is so hard, most people give up.
Re: Mail-in-a-box: easy to set up modern SMTP/SMTPS server stack
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the idea! I've added a test for PTR: https://github.com/JoshData/mailinabox/commit/ec11241a7a619a...
You might also: * Test/alert if your PTR mismatches your HELO name * If your IP is on any of the major RBLs * Point admins toward AOL/Yahoo/ReturnPath whitelists and feedback loops.
Additionally, you should test whether your PTR "smells" dynamic (i.e. contains part of your IP address in the PTR itself.) It may or may not be something within your control, but you should know as it may cause you problems later.
Re: Mail-in-a-box: easy to set up modern SMTP/SMTPS server stack
#116It remains a constant frustration to me that Postfix, Exim, Cyrus, Dovecot and the like still feel as if they belong very much in the "here be dragons" territories of the Unix world. Configuring these systems is an exercise in constant frustration and bafflement. They're such a pain to use that since becoming the sysadmin in charge of our work email servers, I gave up running personal ones as well and just pay FastMa…
Well, you only need two from your list. And I don't really think Postfix+Dovecot is much harder than Nginx+$dynamiclanguage. It's just something fewer people felt the need to do historically.
Re: Mail-in-a-box: easy to set up modern SMTP/SMTPS server stack
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's probably something wrong with me but I quite enjoy the masochistic rituals of getting postfix/dovecot/opendkim/spamassassin/zarafa humming. Postfix is actually a beautiful piece of software once you spend some time with it and get to know it. Like most things, once you've done it a few times (and written everything down!) it isn't so bad :) LDAP on the other hand... that's something that _always_ defeats me.
>> Postfix is actually a beautiful piece of software Couldn't agree more. I've also learned a ton from the source code. If anyone has even a passing interest in security, i'd highly recommend browsing the postfix source code.
No. Just no.
The architecture is, at best, an anachronism.
Designs of much more elegance have been explored (qmail). But as a matter of fact, neither postfix, nor qmail, nor exim, nor (god forbid) sendmail belong into our day and age anymore (I have run 3 of them at scale).
A modern MTA is way overdue. Please keep writing MTAs kids!
In modern languages. Until you get one right. Thanks!
Re: Mail-in-a-box: easy to set up modern SMTP/SMTPS server stack
#118It remains a constant frustration to me that Postfix, Exim, Cyrus, Dovecot and the like still feel as if they belong very much in the "here be dragons" territories of the Unix world. Configuring these systems is an exercise in constant frustration and bafflement. They're such a pain to use that since becoming the sysadmin in charge of our work email servers, I gave up running personal ones as well and just pay FastMa…
It is very much "here be dragons" but a lot of that is because of legacy compatibility issues from when mail was delivered directly to local users. If you don't care about local access (IMAP & POP is good enough, no mutt to the mail spool for you) Dovecot is a huge improvement on everything else. You configure it to listen directly for LMTP and use MySQL for user information and Maildir for data it's almost as easy a…
Just a quick note re:dbmail -- Archiveopteryx (http://aox.org/) looks like a (possibly nicer) alternative.
Re: Mail-in-a-box: easy to set up modern SMTP/SMTPS server stack
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Postfix is actually a beautiful piece of software Couldn't agree more. I've also learned a ton from the source code. If anyone has even a passing interest in security, i'd highly recommend browsing the postfix source code.
No. Just no. The architecture is, at best, an anachronism. Designs of much more elegance have been explored (qmail). But as a matter of fact, neither postfix, nor qmail, nor exim, nor (god forbid) sendmail belong into our day and age anymore (I have run 3 of them at scale). A modern MTA is way overdue. Please keep writing MTAs kids! In modern languages. Until you get one right. Thanks!
I started out with Exim (3.x or 4 -- can't remember now) and stuck with it mostly for the same reasons that Debian didn't change away -- I wasn't convinced postfix was a significantly cleaner/simpler design -- that it would be worth it to learn how the "other" system worked.
I did have some exposure to qmail before that, and it did feel like it was simpler in some good ways -- but then it became a sort of abandonware, sadly.
Any thoughts on Lamson ? (http://lamsonproject.org/)
[edit: I did recently switch a few vps' over to nullmailer rather than use exim4 configured for smarthost delivery -- once I figured out how to get tls working thanks to this blogpost http://metz.gehn.net/2012/11/nullmailer-with-starttls/)]
Re: Mail-in-a-box: easy to set up modern SMTP/SMTPS server stack
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is very much "here be dragons" but a lot of that is because of legacy compatibility issues from when mail was delivered directly to local users. If you don't care about local access (IMAP & POP is good enough, no mutt to the mail spool for you) Dovecot is a huge improvement on everything else. You configure it to listen directly for LMTP and use MySQL for user information and Maildir for data it's almost as easy a…
Re "zero point of failure mail system": I also use Dovecot, and I learnt about DSync recently, although haven't played with it yet. It provides two way synchronisation of mailboxes between two Dovecot servers, so you can store the same mail on two boxes, in completely different locations. The clever thing is, it can recover from a split brain scenario completely, safely, and without any losses. If your two servers ca…
So, for S3, I cheat and have my own Riak CS cluster so storage is fairly quick and cheap. I should probably use Riak unless the message is too big and then put the body in CS but I was thinking that straight-up S3 is a good lowest common denominator for storing things.
Basically when I started out learning Go I saw a presentation by bradfitz where he made a POP3 server that used twitter for the backend and thought hey, access S3 instead. He had a smtp library on github so I hacked up something that accepts all mail and stores it in a S3 bucket too. I haven't hacked in things like user auth so it's all very proof of concept/useless at this point.
I'll have to take another look at DSync. The SSH batch job per user scared me off last time. I might be able to use it for HA/Failover.