Hello all, I am a newbie college student looking to do a quick project to teach myself more about the workings of email servers.

What i want to do is setup 1 linux computer on my home network to run postfix and run ipop3, and then i want to send local email to different users on that same machine.

can i do this without having a domain name? maybe i'm confusing myself because all the examples i've read on setting up your own email server they all want me to setup a domain name.


basically i want to have a second computer use a mail client like thunderbird send mail through computer #1's postfix service, and then i want to retrieve that email in the same fashion using ipop3 service.


i suppose this is also more of a demonstration to see if this will work.


can anyone shed more light on if i'm on the right track? and if i'm missing anything else?

If it's all internal, you can setup and use whatever domain name you wanted really. Shouldn't be a problem whatsoever.

that's sort of complex.

your machine has a 'domain name' --- a fake one. sort-of.

a domain name that we all know and love is www.whatever.com or something like that. but your linux box can also have a domain name that does not have to be registered or real or anything. it is kind of like a 'workgroup' in windows. when you set up your box, it'll ask you what domain the machine is in, so give it some name like home.net --- so YOURNAME@home.net email will get bounced to your home lan box. problem is, you have to setup a DNS entry on your local machines that tells them all to use 'home.net' as your local IP address rather than the real home.net.