[Nolug] one way to run a home mail server without violating your ISP's User Agreement

http://souptonuts.sourceforge.net/postfix_tutorial.html

Excellent tutorial for using a remote gmail account and a local postfix
installation to run your own mail server. There is no concern with running
afoul of your ISP's user agreement here because with this config you could
actually leave port 25 blocked at your network edge. You are retrieving mail
with fetchmail and sending it out through Google's SMTP server.

Wait, but I can't send mail out on port 25 with Cox! Okay. you have two
choices, change the instructions in the tutorial to relay outbound through Cox,
or use the alternative "submission" port 587 to relay mail out through
smtp.gmail.com.

The tutorial is excellent and a lot of concepts are taught that should
encourage further exploration by the reader. If you're interested in
configuring mailservers and learning that kind of network plumbing, it's worth
a look. He doesn't cover spam and virii filtering, but those are easily plugged
into your local postfix installation.

In fact, I've been doing a similar configuration for some time. I have a
remote site hosting my "scottharney.com" MX and use fetchmail to retrieve that.
  I also have a yahoo account that I retrieve and put into the local
postfix->procmail stream with fetchyahoo. (http://fetchyahoo.sourceforge.net/ )
mail is sent out using Cox's relays though i could just as easily use a port
587 submission relay with SMTP AUTH and TLS (and in fact, I do this when I'm
travelling).

In addition to postfix, I have a couple of imapd servers running, one has my
current mail feed, and the other links into my fairly large mail archive. (I
use mairix to index and create ad-hoc search folders of my Maildirs) I can ssh
in and read mail with mutt. Or I can forward port tunnels appropriately with
SSH to use another convenient mail client with IMAP (thunderbird). And I do
break the ISP rules a bit by having a webmail client running on my home server
as well (listening on https 443) for those truly icky situations where ssh is
blocked.

while setting this scenario up took significant time and effort, it is easily
maintained once it's all up and running. For me, the time investment was worth
it as this has grown with me over the years when Linux was just a hobby to
being part of my professional life supporting ISP mail servers and
infrastructure. It was often convenient for me to experiment with new things
(clamav antivirus, spamassassin and spamd, tmda (tmda.sf.net) ) at home first
before rolling it into a customer's configuration.

DiY home servers may not make sense for everyone's needs, but if one has the
inclination, Linux gives you a powerful toolkit to explore and use.

-- 
Scott Harney <scotth@scottharney.com>
"Asking the wrong questions is the leading cause of wrong answers"
gpg key fingerprint=7125 0BD3 8EC4 08D7 321D CEE9 F024 7DA6 0BC7 94E5
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