I would like to setup my own IMAP and SMTP mail server on Slackware. What's the best way to do this? With Sendmail? Are there any tutorials? I've seen some things here (like this site), but that tutorial is somewhat outdated (before 2009).

thanks

You can find lots of tutorials and articles about this. Since you're talking about Linux command line programs, you don't really need something specifically for Slackware, though that might make it a little easier.

Since Sendmail is a mature program that has been around for ages, a tutorial from 2009 is likely still valid.

There is this on the Slackware wiki: http://docs.slackware.com/howtos:mis...ifx_with_cyrus

A search for "configure mail server slackware" will turn up a number of useful articles.

Sendmail is an extremely complex program. You might consider Postfix as an alternative. Sendmail is included with Slackware; postfix or another alternative would need to be installed.

Check your ISP's terms of service. Many of them forbid public-facing servers, including mail servers, unless you have a business-level account. I know that mine does, and enforces the prohibition aggressively.

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Here's my own HOWTO on the subject, in french:

http://www.microlinux.fr/slackware/L...Mail-HOWTO.txt

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If it's a home setup, your IP range will be listed as spam. A Long fight awaits you.

If you've got a decent ISP you ought to be able to sort out stuff like a static IP and reverse DNS with them.

Having hosted my own email account on both sendmail and postfix, I can 100% recommend postfix. Sendmail syntax is the worst thing I've ever seen .. and I love perl, so that should tell you something.

I run postfix and dovecot, and they work wonderful together.

-Andy

Typical customer service people are often clueless, you have to find the hidden real IT guys, especially for reverse DNS.

It tells me that coffee coming out of my nose hurts. Good one!

An alternative if you run into the problems mentioned above is to use an externally hosted email address (webhost, isp, hotmail, whatever) and then use something like fetchmail to feed the mail to your IMAP server.

Brian

http://slackbuilds.org/repository/14...m/?search=exim
http://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.1/network/dovecot/

Just make sure that you send your emails through the ISP's SMTP server by defining that one as your SmartHost. All your mail will be delivered.

As for receiving email: setup your own domain or use one of the free dynamic DNS services like dnsdynamic.org. that way you can define a MX host for your domain and as long as port 25 is not blocked by your ISP, you're good to go.

I have been doing that ever since my home got connected to the Internet, long ago.
And I am using Sendmail (with SpamAssassin and ClamAV plugged in for filtering out the bad stuff) for the mail delivery, and Cyrus IMAP as the mailserver, using fetchmail to poll my ISP's mailbox regularly and deposit the new emails into my IMAP inbox at home.

Eric

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@Eric, would you comment on why you chose Cyrus over dovecot?

Yes, this guide said to define smart_host. Sending is working for me.I like http://freedns.afraid.org/ better … anyways…I bet my ISP does block it…

---------- Post added 10-21-14 at 09:16 PM ----------

Nice guide! And I do read French. Merci!

I have setup, maintained and administered a Cyrus IMAP server for several hundred people with gigabytes' mailboxes for years. It scales very well, performs very well, is very resilient against database corruption. These qualities are following from the "one file per email" concept. No big mailfiles.
Also it offers Sieve mail-filtering out of the box (the Cyrus Project was one of the first to implement it properly and in full).
Cyrus IMAP servers can be setup as "black boxes". The mail accounts do not have to be reflected as system accounts, so you won't have hundreds of potential local root exploit attack vectors because nobody will have a login account to your server. The cyrus user-ID is the only account that can access the mail spool. The downside of this is, that you have to create every individual mailbox. There is a script in "contribs" that takes care of automatic mailbox creation when a user connects to the IMAP server for the first time, but I am too paranoid to allow that.

I am very comfortable with Cyrus IMAP. I have written a SlackBuild script based on the RPM SPEC file for the Invoca implementation of Cyrus IMAP that I got used to, and have been running that as a Slackware package since Slackware 10 on my home server.

I can not comment on Dovecot because I never used it.

Eric

Yes, in- and out-bound port 25 is blocked by my ISP (outbound only open if sent to their SMTP server). Is there any way around this?