271–280 of 339 posts
Its useful as quite often youll get blocked just for being in the same IP block as a spammy server. My experience to date is that once you notify them your IP isnt the culprit the block gets removed pretty quick.
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Any outgoing mail will almost certainly be spam-blocked if you send from a residential IP. Also, most ISPs block port 25.
Nope. When you ask your ISP for a static-IP address, your service goes from Residential to a more expensive Business account, and they open up outgoing mail ports. (At least for Verizon FIOS that I'm on, pretty sure Comcast is same as well.) Cloud IP addresses are probably more problematic for spam blocklists.
Curious though, can you also set your own reverse DNS entry for your static ip? I’ve found many mail servers will reject your mail if rDNS records don’t match up.
If youre running your own email services and wonder why outlook.com / hotmail.com are blocking you you can signup for this. https://postmaster.live.com/snds Its useful as quite often youll get blocked just for being in the same IP block as a spammy server. My experience to date is that once you notify them your IP isnt the culprit the block gets removed pretty quick.
If you like email Zimbra's great - it's a fully baked mail server which you install on your Linux distro of choice and it goes off and installs all of the above for you. Everything is managed via a GUI and you have a great web interface and standards based IMAP, CalDAV support.
If you buy the paid version you can even get ActiveSync and Exchange Web Services for it.
Despite all that though, I would give anything to have all those countless hours I put into running my own mail server back. It is a colossal time sink. I can't even stress how much work it is, especially if you have anyone relying on the box for their primary mail account. It's no fun at all.
You're gonna be debugging Fetchmail for when you or your user's want POP3 accounts downloading mail locally. Procmail for filtering. SpamAssassin (gawd if ever there was something which consumed my life it's that software and its myriad libs and helpers), not to mention familiarize yourself with DNS MX records, SPF, DKIM etc. etc.
All of the above works surprisingly well and is fairly solid - until it isn't. When Google added DKIM/SPF protection and blacklisted servers which didn't was a fun weekend that I'd rather have spent with my family. When customer emails started bouncing because their IPs had hit an over zealous RBL list which Zimbra was using was a fun afternoon of debugging. When Zimbra decides to randomly let in 10-20 spam emails a day into my mailbox is another weekend project which I've yet to get round to. Thank god I'm self employed is all I can say because no employer would tolerate an employee putting the care and feeding required to maintain a personal email server!
Unless you want to nurture a career as a mail sysadmin seriously, don't host your own mail server.
Bottom line I'd recommend to anyone thinking about hosting one to either:
1. Don't
2. Use Microsoft Exchange Server
3. Use Zimbra
4. Seriously, don't - consider Fastmail, Gmail, O365 or Protonmail instead.
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I ran my own mail server (a few VMs in the cloud) for about five years. It's fun as you have control over accounts, aliases, forwarding, sieve tricks as well as backups. It's good to know that your broker and doctor's mail is delivered directly to your server and not Google. It sucks ass when your mail does not get through as GMail/Hotmail rejects a connection from the IP address your cloud company allocated for you,…
> It sucks ass when your mail does not get through as GMail/Hotmail rejects a connection from the IP address your cloud company allocated for you, in spite of DKIM etc. God, yes. Gmail, in particular, really enjoyed just dropping connections from my IPv6 addresses every few months. Sometimes it would return an error, something obtuse and wrong like maybe, "your forward and reverse DNS records do not match" even thoug…
Worst of all, the mail does not always bounce... and when it does, this is no one to email and ask. What are mail admins supposed to do?
I run my own mail infrastructure. To say the least I wouldn't recommend it even to my worst enemies. It's horrible. Actually it's fine until it's not. Then your email doesn't work and you could be missing out on important communications. And then you're scrambling to figure out how the spammers managed to exploit your setup this time. And you have to learn a tonne of crap in order to manage it... and the text files!…
Edit: it's been so long that i forgot it was in fact postfix.
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Your custom MTA is impressive, but if you want to reduce the amount of custom code you need to maintain (and don't mind one third party service in the mix), you could use something like SpamHero. It's reasonably effective and fairly cheap. Postini was even better, before Google bought them and bastardized the product.
Agreed. I would love to ditch the customisations and run something standard!
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Backup MX is usually not necessary, especially for home setups. Anything RFC-compliant will retry sending its email to you for days after being rejected.
It's also generally not a wise idea unless you also have your anti-spam/anti-virus setup running on it as well, since things like graylisting can only be done BEFORE the MTA accepts the message. Spammers WILL know how to search your mx records for things like mailbagging servers and try to exploit them to bypass your security, just don't do it - the sending party will retry.
Running since 1998, haven't been on any blocklists so far.
One thing I'd like to see covered is sender dependent outgoing mail routing. For example, suppose I have things set up so all outgoing mail from my home goes through my SMTP server. If I send an email with a from address of tzs@mydomain, then the setup in the article is perfect. Suppose, though, I send an email from home with my from address set to tzs@employer, where "employer" is my employer's domain? Assume this e…
Handling this server side seems weird. Why not just have a profile in your mail client that lets you send personal email through the personal server and work email through the work server. You end up with a much more robust setup that works without extra hops through a 2nd mail server. It also provides immediate feedback if sending an email fails for some reason. If Apple mail is broken and keeps dropping things I'd…
Then I have to have my desktop email client set up for both personal and work email sending, and my iPhone email client set of for both, and my Surface Pro 4 email client set up for both.
If everything, both sending and receiving, goes through my server, then all my client devices just have to use that one server.
In general, it just seems cleaner to keep the email clients as simple as possible and put as much of the decision making as possible on my server.
> Before we dive in, an important caveat: You will become a sysadmin of your own mail server. This for me is the deal breaker. I say this as a sysadmin. It's all well and good running a single server but if that shits the bed then you have to deal with it immediately. So to run something that doesn't require 24/7 support I now have to run a cluster of servers. I'll also need something to manage those servers like sal…
> if that shits the bed then you have to deal with it immediately If it's just for your own use, no you don't. If a mail server is down, other mail servers trying to send mail to it will re-try for some time. Just this week I was remotely logged in and screwed the iptables making the machine catatonic to the outside world. Came home in the evening and didn't even bother fixing it until after dinner and various other…
Yes, servers are supposed to resend when they can't connect, but in practice for those periods where the backup MX was down, I'd still lose some messages I know I should have received.