[OT] Home Email Server?

[Derek Broughton]

Mark Greenwood wrote:

> Not strictly Kubuntu related this one, but there seem to be plenty of
> clever people on here. Kind of follows on from the kmail discussion we
> were having. Because I have one of these new-fangled laptop things ( ;) )
> I want to be able to access my email when I'm on the move. However, my
> ISP, in their infinite wisdom, will only let me access their mail servers
> if I am connected to my home cable connection. (I can see why they do this
> though). So at the moment I am limited to webmail (and that really is evil
> :D ).

Well, you're not, but that's beside the point because what you want to do is
reaonable.

You can always show your ISP the finger, and get all your mail via gmail,
giving you the option of accessing the mail via webmail, imap or pop3.
 
> So.. what I want to do is to have a server at home. I should be able to
> connect to this server via ssh from anywhere (I already have dynamic DNS
> and the server, I just need to know what to install on it....). This
> server provides me with IMAP mailbox(es), and collects my POP3 mail from
> my ISP into those mailboxes. It also provides me with an SMTP relay server
> so I can send mail via my ssh connection to my ISP. I think the latter can
> be done somehow with sendmail.. but the former..??

Ack!  Sendmail is evil...

postfix is much simpler.

You'll need a pop/imap server, so install dovecot - it's trivial.  Forget
about accessing it via ssh - just require imaps or pop3s connections. 
postfix supplies the relay server (here, ssh probably is simpler than
configuring authorization for smtp), and you can use fetchmail to collect
mail from elsewhere.

> Doing it this way avoids the complexities and expenses of registering my
> own email domain, which I really don't want to do.

Which turns out to be surprisingly easy.  I own "pointerstop.ca". 
dnspark.net provides my DNS, google hosts mail for pointerstop.ca, the MX
points to gmail, and all my mail goes to @pointerstop.ca.  And then all you
have to do is keep your ownership of the domain and never worry about what
your ISP is doing again...

-- 
derek