Re: [Hampshire] TRYING to set up my own simple mail server? …

> Jason mentioned that there was going to be
> some business-related stuff going through this machine too

That would be more incentive to do it myself, were I in his shoes.

Email is ubiquitous these days; many people (wrongly) perceive an email
accepted - sometimes even an email sent - as an email received.

Relying on an external provider means that a sender will often see his
email being accepted by "your" MTA, even though that mail never makes it
through to you. That can cause problems - problems which are entirely
obviated if the receiving MTA always delivers any mail it accepts. To
ensure that, the MTA needs to be fairly well integrated with the domain it
serves - and that often means running it yourself[1].

> If you are confident you can reinstall from bare metal in an hour or two
> then that's all well and good, but if you only went through the process
> once, got a load of help and didn't write it up properly, then it's a
> different matter. Especially if you are a couple of years down the line,
> the business is growing and the mail server dies suddenly...

That's why my servers are as standard as possible. I install the stock
MTA, the stock build of spamassassin and spamass-milter, and (if there are
going to be Windows users on it) clamav & clamav-milter. Then I tell it
the domains I want it to serve (if I haven't got a backup of the config
files), turn on the external interface & test for open relay. Job done in
well under an hour.

If I really thought I might forget that lot, I'd write it down and glue it
to the inside of the mailserver case...

> be wary of a machine where new apps are
> being installed all the time and other users have privileged access as
> it makes troubleshooting bothersome.

Well, if you give untrusted people privileged access to a line-of-business
machine, you're asking for trouble. But that's not the same as requiring a
dedicated machine - just a realisation of the value of that machine not
being broken.

Vic.


[1] Yes, I know there are organisations that can do this for you. But they
are rarely cheap...