I want desperately to rid myself of using online mail servers.
Having never run a mail server ( and knowing little about the whole process ) I was wondering if the following idea is possible.

If I set up Sendmail on one of my internal machines as an MTA and use Pine as my MUA, change the listening port that Sendmail uses and give my IP address to friends and coworkers, could I recieve mail directly from them without leaving a message trail on public servers?

I am thinking that as long as my server is accessible from the outside, it should be doable.

Thanks gang.

Hi there,

I was just like you! I was tired of using hotmail and such and so I too setup a mail server. A couple of comments:

1. *I* (others disagree) wouldn't use sendmail as I heard that it is a horror to configure and such. Everyone has their own opinion. I use exim. It's very simple. Others like using postfix which I heard is simple as well....

2. If you change the listening port on your smtp server...then you will never be able to receive mail. Smtp can only talk to smtp and the inbound port is 25. If you change that, again, you will never see mail.

Curious, why would you want to change your inbound port? Are you afraid that people might use your smtp server as a relay?

-twantrd

twantrd,

Thanks for the suggestions.

After spending some time installing and playing around with Sendmail, I agree with you about the level of complexity involved. It looks like it is overkill for what I would like to do.

I thought that changing my listening port might afford me some extra level of security because it is a well-known port. If I did change the port number wouldn't it work if the people who sent me mail adjusted thier MUA to point to the port number on my server? Probably talking major headache there .......

Like I said, I know very little about mail servers at this point.

Thanks again.

For starters, forget your idea about switching the port from 25. That's not going to work and if it did work, it wouldn't increase security. The people looking to exploit services are scanning ALL your ports and noting what services are listening on each.

Here's what you ought to do. Install Postfix via RPM. Install courier-imap via RPM. Install Squirrelmail by downloading it from http://www.squirrelmail.org and unzip it into your html directory. If you've got webmin installed, you can easily modify the postfix config to work for your domain. As for security, the only thing you don't want to allow is relaying for hosts outside your subnet. This is disabled by default.

Squirrelmail will give you and your pals a web-based email interface like what you've got with hotmail, etc... but without advertising or limits on mail box storage. Plus you can hook up spamassassin as well.

good luck,

di11rod

Well I managed to get everything I supposedly would need installed and working,

Apache
PHP4
Courier-IMAP
Webmin
Squirrelmail

and ran conf.pl according to the Squirrelmail website, I get the following whenever I load the login page:

Output:

Warning: session_start(): open(/root/phpSessionInfo/sess_a281adbbd4ae828b7e445ae8c089a60b, O_RDWR) failed: Permission denied (13) in /var/www/localhost/htdocs/squirrelmail/functions/global.php on line 295

Warning: session_start(): Cannot send session cookie - headers already sent by (output started at /var/www/localhost/htdocs/squirrelmail/functions/global.php:295) in /var/www/localhost/htdocs/squirrelmail/functions/global.php on line 295

Warning: session_start(): Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent (output started at /var/www/localhost/htdocs/squirrelmail/functions/global.php:295) in /var/www/localhost/htdocs/squirrelmail/functions/global.php on line 295

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /var/www/localhost/htdocs/squirrelmail/functions/global.php:295) in /var/www/localhost/htdocs/squirrelmail/functions/i18n.php on line 1616

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /var/www/localhost/htdocs/squirrelmail/functions/global.php:295) in /var/www/localhost/htdocs/squirrelmail/src/login.php on line 49


The actual login interface sits at the bottom of the screen after the previous error messages.
It is obvious it has something to do with global.php. It mentions a permissions problem and to check /root/phpSessionInfo but there are no files in that directory. If that is the problem, I have no idea what to do. Googling hasn't helped at all.


Thanks gang.