So You Want To Host Your Own Linux Mail Server ...

Jeff writes "Recently, I moved my personal mail from a hosted Windows 2003 application to my own virtual Linux server. I now have nearly unlimited storage, full control over my e-mail and it's less than $10/month. Here's why I did it and here's how I did it. And I'm not a Linux geek."

Comments

thanx for the free advertising

[Max von H.]

It's just an ad for some virtual host that looks like a howto.

Bleh.

Bad form.

[adolf]

Registering a domain (or anything else, really) to an ISP email account is a bad idea.

So your forgetful cousin switches from SBC DSL to Roadrunner. He'll still miss his renewal reminders.

Case in point: There's a salesman where I work who used to use his personal DSL account to conduct business. That DSL pipe never really worked very well, but for the longest time it was all he could get. Sometime later, he switched to cable. But he's still paying Way Too Much for a DSL account that isn't connected to anything but an open loop, just to keep his old address alive. That old email is printed on thousands of business cards and in Godknowshowmany telephone books. It'll cost him $90, every month, until the end of time.

Better to just create for yourself an account with a free POP3 provider, so that you don't have so many services and accounts tied to an ISP whose sole purpose in life -should be- to just provide some bandwidth (and, perhaps, Usenet).

But it's even better to register yourself a free domain (afraid.org is your friend) and use that for all that Important Stuff that relates to one's Other Domain.

And it's arguably even better than that to use -both- of these techniques, while instructing your free POP3 host to forward mail to an address at your free domain.

That way, if it all comes to horrible screeching halt (not even Linux is immune to Sudden Catastrophic Failure Syndrome), you've still got a happy free webmail interface to which your Important Stuff is already going.

This also has the added advantage of being another hop for email to traverse. Normally, this might be considered a bad thing, but it eliminates the need for a secondary MX server (which can be difficult to source for free) for all imaginable home uses. And so, if your email box becomes un-fubar'd within a reasonable amount of time, you never miss a message.

(If you're having trouble finding a free email host that enables this functionaliry, just look up about 8 paragraphs.)

Lots of steps? Sure. But nobody ever said it was -easy- to have reliable email without paying anyone an extra cent.

It wasn't very hard for me to set up such a sytem, here. I've maintained a *nix box at home for printing, storage, and routing for almost a decade. It was rather easy to set up Postfix and amavis on that machine, configure dhcpcd to update my IP address at afraid.org, and get my mail forwarded over to it. Roadrunner does a pretty good job of keeping the machine connected for the $50/month that I was going to be paying anyway, and during those times when they don't, my free email provider keeps a backlog for me. It's not tainted with any of that fetchmailesque nonsense, and if I ever hop ISPs, things keep working automatically.

So, since I already had the box and the bandwidth, the whole bag cost me precisely dick but a few hours of my time. I get to keep my own backups without worrying about bandwidth or quotas. And it's at least as reliable as Hotmail. (grin, snicker, etc)