Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: newcomer:

[Richard Freeman]

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Peter Davoust wrote:
> Well, that was also an enlightening e-mail. I just disabled and deleted
> all cookies in Firefox, and now I'm going to do as Richard described and
> setup my own e-mail account. Any good ideas/howto's about how to setup a
> mail server?
>

Well, I'm guessing you don't have much background, so your first
objective will probably be to ease yourself into this without getting
innundanted and losing all your email for a week due to some glitch.

I'd SLOWLY go through the following steps:

1.  Get a basic mail server running on your system - you generally need
one anyway if only so that cron jobs and such can send mail to your root
account.  This will be internal-only.

2.  Play around with sending mail to yourself locally - just to get a
feel for things.

3.  Get an IMAP server running - and then try viewing your play mail
through it using thunderbird/kmail/whatever.

4.  Set up fetchmail to retrieve your real mail and forward it to you.
You can use an appropriate option at first so that it only copies your
mail and you can still use gmail/etc on the side.

5.  Set up your mailserver to send outgoing mail - probably via your ISP
(you can just send it directly but if you have a dynamic IP you might
get spamfiltered by the big players).  This can be a little tricky.

6.  Start using your local mail in production - send your mail from this
box and read it from the IMAP store.  You still have your email saved at
gmail in case anything goes wrong.

7.  Experiment with procmail/spamassassin/clamav/etc.  Again, a good
time to do this is when you won't risk losing mail.

8.  Go ahead and cut the umbilical cord if you want.

9.  Look into setting up a dynamic DNS and set up your own incoming
mailserver.  Play with that for a while before advertising your new address.

10.  Tell the world about your new address.

If you only get up to step 5/6 or so you'll realize most of the
benefits, and you'll learn a ton.  If you take your time you won't end
up in any frustrating situations.

There are a ton of howtos out there gentoo and otherwise.  I'd probably
recommend the following setup:

postfix as a mail server - powerful but basically works out of the box
and is comprehensible.

courier-imap as an IMAP server.  There is also dovecot but I've run into
issues with it.

Use maildir-style mailboxes.  They have a number of advantages and are
well supported.

Use fetchmail to retrieve your mail to your local account.  This is a
very powerful program and pretty simple to set up.  Run it as a cron-job
once you've gotten it working.

Once you are ready for the next step clamav is a good virus scanner,
spamassassin works well as a junk filter, and procmail is good for mail
sorting/autoreplying/etc.

If you just did an emerge postfix courier-imap you'd probably be able to
fumble with config files and get yourself running surprisingly fast.  A
good starting point is:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/virt-mail-howto.xml

It is massive overkill - take it one step at a time and unless you're
running an ISP I wouldn't bother with mysql or anything like that.

Keep in mind that you don't REALLY need to run your own mail server, so
take your time and have fun with it.  You'll learn a lot about SMTP in
the process.  And don't open your mail server to the outside world until
you are sure it won't relay spam - or you WILL find yourself in this
position.  There are a ton of open-relay test sites out there which will
let you test yourself out.

Good luck!
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