Re: How to work with portable mail server?

You could investigate using a mail rerouting service (some are free). Most of these advertise the ability to reroute mail to your in-house server on an alternate port, typically when your ISP blocks port 25. What they also do is if your machine doesn't answer, they will stock up your mails for a while acting like a backup MX server. When your machine gets back online, they pipe the received mail to you. You could give that a look, if it works great... i don't personally have experience with mail caching on these services but i know they offer it.

On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 12:12 AM, Kevin Buhr <buhr+debian@asaurus.net> wrote:

Jabka Atu <mashrom.head@gmail.com> writes:
>
> is there a way to use exim to get mails also from the net ?
>
> Althow i know that it can be done using 24 working server that uses
> dyndns / no-ip etc.
>
> but what about when my mail server is on a laptop that can be offline
> for 10-12 hours or even days.

You pretty much need an "always up" mail server to accept your mail,
because that's just how Internet mail works. Mail will be sent to
your server at random times (not long after the sender clicks "Send")
and---where it fails---retried according to the sender's schedule
(i.e., according to the configuration of the sender's outgoing
mailhost, typically) which you can't control.

If your laptop really was online at least 12 hours a day, you might
eventually receive most of your mail (some on first try, some on
retries), but it's really a crapshoot, and there would be all sorts of
problems. Many senders would receive those unsettling messages about
"temporary failure - no need to resend" that always result in the
unschooled resending an additional copy anyway and then calling you on
the phone to make sure you got it. High-traffic mailing lists
wouldn't work: most will give up after a few failed messages and send
you a note asking you for manual confirmation to restart. And if
there were a couple of days that you couldn't get your laptop online
or could only get it online for a couple of hours, you'd probably lose
a chunk of mail.

> is there any way to halt the messages any where ?

The way to halt the messages is to have an "always up" mail server
accept them for you. This may be your 24-hour home server, it may be
an ISP server, it may be a mail hosting service's server, or whatever.
Then, you use "fetchmail" to get the mail onto your laptop and
delivered through your local copy of "exim".

If you don't like your ISP and/or want to use your own domain name and
your ISP won't cooperate, mail hosting services are cheap (say
$10/year) if you just need a modest amount of POPpable storage and an
outgoing relay.

--
Kevin Buhr <buhr+debian@asaurus.net>

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