Sendmail & remote e-mail
 

Hi all,

I am somewhat knowledgeable about sendmail, and I use it, but am certainly no expert. Ok, I have a sendmail server, and it's name is "bob". Right now, all the mail clients are setup so that "bob" is the pop3 incoming and outgoing server.

That's fine. However, when away from the house (this is just a home network), then the only way I (or anyone else) can check e-mail is by putting the external IP address of the server as the incoming. This has got to be frought with security problems, yes?

What is a better way? Am I missing anything? Sorry for such a general question. I'm looking for a point in the right direction and would appreciate help.

Thanks, all.

Chris

WorldBuilder

Not sure if this will help but if you have a Apache server running you could use Squirrelmail, this allows access to your emails via a web browser

This is the tutorial I used for RH 9
Squirrelmail


Pete

Well, I do run apache, but I would rather just stay with sendmail.

Chris

I do not clearly understand what you mean. Do you mean you have to let your pop3 server listen on your firewall in order that you can read the mails from the outside?

If so, you are right: it is a security risk. As anything that listens on the firewall. But that is the price of it.
I myself think that it is still better to have a small pop3 server like e.g. qpopper listen on the firewall than to let apache do the same. Apache is a much more complicated beast with possibly more potential security risks than a tiny pop3 server.

If you have not much confidence in your pop3 server then you can hide it behind e.g. stunnel, that can do some more sophisticated (ssl) authentication than your pop3 server by default, and only lets the connection to the pop3 server, if the authentication was successful. However, then stunnel (and openssl) would be critical as regards safety...

Cool, thanks guys.

Chris