An email server ready for use

[rgmhtt]

I am posting bigfoot65's efforts at putting together a email server environment for Amahi.

http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Amahi_Mail_System

It is NOT one-click. Nor does it have a mySQL table maintenance frontend.

I AM using it for my production mail. On a old PIII/500 (with most amahi services turned off) I am processing ~4000 connections a day which is almost 3000 rejected connections by the spam tools and of the remaing, 1/3 got tagged as spam. I am on a LOT of mail lists so 300 good messages a day is light traffic for me.

For your user GUI you have a choice of your favorite POP3 or IMAP client or the Squirrelmail webmail tool.

You will have to set up your amahi server with a valid public IP address and an MX record pointing your domain to the system. We are looking at tools that will pull webmail systems (gmail, yahoo, etc.) into the system soon.

The system creates TLS/SSL certs for secure mail access so you can safely access your mail over an unsecure network.

I have been running Scalix for the past 6 years. I am happy to get rid of it and move to this system even though it is still a little raw. Of course if you have packaging skills or mySQL skills help is welcome. For now I used phpMyAdmin to populate the database and phpBackupPro to backup same.

Kudo's to bigfoot65 for pulling this together!

[cpg]

awesome work!

personally i think email is a tough tough area. anyone who has run their own MTA for a while knows, and you guys have my respects!

i have not looked at this yet (mostly out of fear of disturbing the peace of my mail processing "tree").

now, is doing it in mysql out of the question?

the reason i ask is this: amahi native apps (like slideshow, recipes, weightwatcher, ...) have essentially "free" access to the database in the platform (which is using mysql).

some thoughts spring to mind: in the new platform for 5.0, we may want to provide some support for this (e.g. authentication, which is planned for 5.0, could be single sign-on).

another thought is to build a small manager in a separate application. amahi native apps leverage the native theme and UI for free and are small.

at any rate, ... great going and many kudos for bigfoot65!

this is definitely an area in demand and quite exciting to see it come along all this way!

[rgmhtt]

The email service uses mySQL for 4 tables:

domains
transport
users
forwarders

Actual emails are stored in:

/home/vmail/domain/user

So you backup the mail database when you make changes to the above tables. You don't have to deal with the problems of having emails in an SQL database. Scalix works that way, and sometimes my db can grow 10Gb larger than is actually used by mail and I can run out of disk space even when the database has lots of room for emails.

There was too much care and feeding of the Scalix system for me. I ONLY have 4 domains and 30 users...

Actually once I get the rest of my users to switch mail servers, I am going to switch harddrives so I can use the P IV that is running the Scalix system and double my Bogomips over the box that currently is running my new Amahi email.

[rgmhtt]

BTW, I have been running my own MTA since '95. Not big stuff, but being a long time IETFer, it was kind of expected.

You can get a real good look at the mySQL tables used by looking at:

http://howtoforge.net/virtual-users-dom ... -fedora-10

Which is what bigfoot65 used as his starting point.

[cpg]

hmm cool. so there is already some mysql action going on there.
managing in a ror front end might not be bad at all.

yeah, email content inside a database ain't my idea of a good thing, methinks.

[rgmhtt]

It is easy to set up a sub-domain mail server.

If your domain is bar.com, you can add an MX record:

test.bar.com IN MX host.bar.com

If you have enough public addresses you have an A record for host.bar.com.

If you are NATed with one public address, host.bar.com is your name of your NAT box and you port map ports 25 and 110 (well at least 25) into your hda.home.com box. If your ISP blocks port 25, Things get more complicated. You can easily set up the transport record to be:

test.bar.com :578

Then your mailer is listening on port 578, but you then have to have an external mail relay that would forward mail to you.

I hate ISPs that block port 25.


Oh, please note that an MX record cannot point to a CNAME, only an A or AAAA record.

I have gotten burnt by this one myself a couple times...