Mail Server...

[Deep_Thought]

Hi,

I'm thinking about setting up a mail server using SL but after some advise... Let me give you some background...

I've been using supportin OSX for soem years now so comfortable with setup etc, have setup a fair few file servers etc in both Win and OSX scenarios so the learing curve etc isn't going to phase me (actually I want to learn about this as opposed to need to)

So the setup I'd be using is 1.8Ghz Mac Mini C2D with 2GB Ram and 10.6 Server, already have these...

I want to setup a mail server with my own domain (been using GMail as well as 1and1's mail servers but want to try it using my own server - this is not a office setup - just for myself and family)

Is there a guide that will show me the ins and outs of Mail on SL? Will I be able to get Push notifications to my iPhone?

Any advise anyone could give would be greatly appreciated...

Thanks

Phil

 

[DoFoT9]

would also like to know this just chiming in

 

[steviem]

This article may shed some light on the situation

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/12/iphone-and-snow-leopard-servers-failure-to-communicate.ars

 

[Deep_Thought]

Wow... starting to think I need to hang on a year or two until Apple sort this mess out...

Perhaps iPhone OS4.0 will address some of this...

 

[DoFoT9]

thats... depressing!

 

[HenryAZ]

Hi,

I want to setup a mail server with my own domain (been using GMail as well as 1and1's mail servers but want to try it using my own server - this is not a office setup - just for myself and family)

Aside from any issues with pushes to your iPhone working or not, you may also encounter some of what I have in trying to set up a home mail server. The key to the problem I describe is in how your IP address resolves in reverse DNS. If it resolves something like this

mmds-216-19-33-17.twm.az.commspeed.net

where it appears to be part of an ISP's dynamic IP assignment block, you will find some large ISP's will blacklist the address and not accept mail from you. The thought on blacklisting ISP dynamic addresses en masse is that there should be no email being sent directly from home user machines, and if there is, it is likely the machine has been compromised as a spam-bot. When I encountered this, I was able to resolve it and get my specific address white-listed at one ISP (SBCGlobal), but another (Hotmail/LiveMail/MSN) would not even acknowledge that they were dropping the emails.

I currently have it working on a static IP that has a "bad" PTR record, so your mileage may vary depending on your ISP. I maintain a valid SPF record and push a DKIM-signature on my emails, so that helps in some places.

 

[carlclarke]

Mail and SLS

I tried a different setup, for home email I prefer to host the domain with an ISP and retrieve the email. I use Fetchmail to get mail from a 1&1 hosted domain every few minutes rather than try to fight with the issues around dynamic IP addresses. The other benefit is that a home system will (probably) rely on services from your broadband provider and your electricity company so if your system goes down while you are not at home your email just queues up at your ISP (and is easily readable).

I have not tried the email push service and calendar etc as it requires opening up extra ports on your firewall. I get my email to iPhone via the iPhone VPN connection. It is not ideal and I will be experimenting with the non-VPN solutions in the near future. Oh and yes - Contacts are a kludge from SLS to Mac to MobileMe to iPhone

The upside - I have a MacMini Server sipping a few watts now looking beautiful on show in the house instead of two W2K3 servers running Exchange, AD etc using nearly 1kW to heat the garage

 

[twoodcc]

I tried a different setup, for home email I prefer to host the domain with an ISP and retrieve the email. I use Fetchmail to get mail from a 1&1 hosted domain every few minutes rather than try to fight with the issues around dynamic IP addresses. The other benefit is that a home system will (probably) rely on services from your broadband provider and your electricity company so if your system goes down while you are not at home your email just queues up at your ISP (and is easily readable).

I have not tried the email push service and calendar etc as it requires opening up extra ports on your firewall. I get my email to iPhone via the iPhone VPN connection. It is not ideal and I will be experimenting with the non-VPN solutions in the near future. Oh and yes - Contacts are a kludge from SLS to Mac to MobileMe to iPhone

The upside - I have a MacMini Server sipping a few watts now looking beautiful on show in the house instead of two W2K3 servers running Exchange, AD etc using nearly 1kW to heat the garage

now this sounds like an interesting setup. i'd like to hear more about this.

so basically you use fetchmail to retreive the mail? how exactly does it work?

 

[myjay610]

I tried running a mail server just for the heck of it at home. For the dynamic IP issue you can just sign up for dyndns then wherever your domain is hosted you can set your MX record to point to your dyndns address and ensure the proper ports are forwarded to your mail server machine. I received emails just as fast on my blackberry via IMAP as I do for gmail. Like someone else said, the only problem is sending emails because as a residential IP, it is blacklisted from sending e-mails by default.

 

[carlclarke]

now this sounds like an interesting setup. i'd like to hear more about this.

so basically you use fetchmail to retreive the mail? how exactly does it work?

Fetchmail is installed on SLS - there is a *huge* manual at the following address: http://fetchmail.berlios.de/fetchmail-man.html. The hand rolled solution involves setting up fetchmail and then sheduling it to run as a service periodically. I found many articles but none were really clear about the whole setup. In the end I found some utility program called MailServe Snow (costs $25) and used it to set things up. The problem that I had was that the utility set up fetchmail ok but seemed to mess up other settings and some mail services kept stopping. When I manually configured those using Server Admin it eventually all came to life.

It has been working well for about 2 months now.

 

[twoodcc]

Fetchmail is installed on SLS - there is a *huge* manual at the following address: http://fetchmail.berlios.de/fetchmail-man.html. The hand rolled solution involves setting up fetchmail and then sheduling it to run as a service periodically. I found many articles but none were really clear about the whole setup. In the end I found some utility program called MailServe Snow (costs $25) and used it to set things up. The problem that I had was that the utility set up fetchmail ok but seemed to mess up other settings and some mail services kept stopping. When I manually configured those using Server Admin it eventually all came to life.

It has been working well for about 2 months now.

oh ok. i'll have to play with it this weekend then. so you can set it up in Server Admin?