On 2018-04-24 20:56, J.W. Foster wrote:
I am trying once again to get an email server to run on my server. I NEED a qualified tutorial or some real assistance in getting it operational and secure. I am aware that there are MANY primers or docs on this. Problem is they like most are done for an individuals system and are not really designed for my system. So here is what I'm working with: 1. all IP addresses are DHCP regulated by Spectrum internet. 2. I do have a fully functioning Mediawiki website running on this server and it is just fine. Spectrum doesn't often change the IP addresses. 3. I have installed Dovecot and Postfix out of the box with no changes, for MTA and mail server 4. I have Thunderbird as my MUI. 5. All this is running on a system using Debian 9 (stable) with plenty of CPU and memory horsepower for the job. I want to use this system to both send and receive email ONLY for this server. There is only one user account currently and that is mine. I need to be able to allow my Mediawiki system send replies to my membership and to receive queries and emails from that membership. Ther may be additional user accounts that need to be set up but for now, only mine. I have been sort of able to send a few test emails to my secondary testing account locally. Sending to an outside system such as my own Gmail or Yahoo simply does not work. I was getting an error message but I reinstalled everything again and am still getting that message> An error occurred while sending mail. The mail server responded: 4.7.1 <jfoster81747@yahoo.com>: Relay access denied.
Hello J.W.,I understand your point, about the tutorials on internet. Most of the them are covering a small part of email hosting and a lot of other aspects are simply ignored. I would not put my emails live with doing only just what these tutorials are explaining.
I have hosted my emails for a while, now, and I recently started a project on Github that may suit your needs. The principle is to deploy a mail server on a Debian standard server, without installing anything from source or a git repository. Only Debian packages from maintained repositories. Instead of being a long and theoretical tutorial, it is a set of Ansible scripts. It is also oriented towards security and stability, thanks to Debian.
As you could read in the other answers, having an IP address that change from time to time may affect your delivery, and TTL is perhaps the best solution. The project I have started also covers this aspect, to a certain extent.
One solution that works for me, when my server is offline: I have setup a backup MX record using the DNS provider (Gandi) and I get emails automatically from this server when connecting. The script is setting this up very easily.
Your only concern would be someone setting up am catchall server and waiting for his server to receive emails from your domain. If you are receiving personal and confidential email, I suggest you not to do it, except if all emails are encrypted.
My project is meant to be at home, but I think it should be fine if you are using a remote server. You may have to set the AppArmor flag to false, as the scripts are deploying AppArmor profiles by default.
https://github.com/progmaticltd/homebox Kind regards, André