Ubuntu 20.04 sendmail

[David Fletcher]

On Fri, 2021-07-02 at 11:30 -0400, Jerry Geis wrote:

>HI Dave, 
>
>How do I get incoming email to work.  I am all setup for procmail ?
>
>Jerry 

I've no idea why but my email client (Evolution) loses your last
posting when I reply but shows the previous ones, on two different
computers so I've just copy/pasted it back in.

You can do what I used to do when I first started fooling around with
setting up my own mail server, which was to have fetchmail kicked off
by cron every once in a while to download messages from the mailbox at
google, hotmail, virgin, whatever and configured to pass them to
postfix or procmail. Apparently it's a better solution these days to
use getmail/getmail4 but I'm not running it at the moment.

I wasn't happy with that after a while so got my own domain name
through the 1&1 registrar. You can still use their mailbox with getmail
if you want but the more elegant solution is to have your email go
direct to your own server. If you're running the server at home you'll
likely be stuck with a dynamic IP address so you'd want to use
something like the noip service which has reliably worked for me for
over a decade. They provide a client which you compile on your server
and keeps the noip server updated with your current IP address then you
go back to your domain registrar and edit your mx record to point at
the user name you set up with noip. Then your email gets directed to
your own personal server. Neat. Then you just have to set up your
aliases file to get postfix which is then an internet exposed SMTP
server to chuck messages into the correct users mailbox.

Oh, and I suggest you make sure to set it to use maildir, put
home_mailbox = Maildir/
towards the top of the main.cf file

and you will also need a mail server so that you can access your email
from some client or other. I use dovecot which I seem to recall needs
very little configuration. My notes file reads:-

edit /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf and use the text of line 24
to replace the default config in line 30 with
mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir

Always keep notes for next time!

Oh, PS - you'll need to set up some port forwards on your Internet
router so that incoming SMTP gets directed to your server, and also
IMAP so that you can get at your server when away on holiday,

And a UPS

And, .... no doubt something esle..