[Freedombox-discuss] Email on the FreedomBox Discussion
> I make a living as a systems administrator for a few places, including a
> small business university. At that business university I noticed a few
> years back that less than 1% of received email was legitimate. I do
> reject most possible email "at the gates", but still more than 99% of
> the emails that enter through and is applied the relatively expensive
> content-based scanning, turn out to be spam.
>
> Both the routines to reject "at the gates" and to scan content rely
> heavily on external, constantly updated databases. Centralized ones.
>
> My point is, that my mail servers depend on centralized pieces to manage
> email and still needs to spend a noticable amount of resources locally.
>
> I would be very interested in concrete proposals for improved email
> handling. If working solutions are found that a) rely less on
> centralized services and b) use less resources, then we can apply those
> generally to existing mail servers throughout the globe - and consider
> installing on FreedomBox as well.
>
This is suggested with a bit of naive hand-waving. Lately I've been
playing around with Postfix and I found this tutorial on how to use
Postfix as a local Mail Transfer Agent for your GMail account:
http://souptonuts.sourceforge.net/postfix_tutorial.html
The relevant section to this conversation, in my mind, is section 4.5.
Basically, in his setup, he has two computers on his local network and
if email is to be sent to users on either of those computers, Postfix
should deliver them directly. If the recipient isn't on the network,
then it should be sent to GMail's SMTP server. It seems to me that such
functionality could be used to differentiate between emailing people on
the FBX network and people on the normal internet.
It seems much like the DNS question to me. In the beginning, at least,
many people will still probably depend on a centralized SMTP server, but
that won't be a big problem because I don't foresee everyone ditching
their centralized email accounts as soon as they set up a FBX. So, in
the transition period,FBX users could send email to other FBX users
securely, with their messages never even going through any large
corporate MTAs that would likely filter them as spam or malicious; when
they have to send an email to Aunt Margaret, they can just forward it
off to a corporately "legitimate" SMTP server.
I'm not sure if this can be done with Postfix out of the box, or how
much it will depend on Postfix's ability to interpret the final FBX
network addressing system. Also, I have no idea if Postfix is too huge
for FBXs in general. If that's the case, perhaps ssmtp could be hacked a
bit to allow setting multiple relays.
-brandon
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