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Comment by spindritf | Hacker News Reader

I run my own e-mail server and it's a lot of work. I have exim with ACLs, spamd and just mutt. Nothing "fancy" like other users, pop3/imap/smtp auth, virus scanning, additional mxs...

Still took me a weekend to get ACLs right, tune the threshold for greylisting (I greylist e-mails which score between two and seven points in Spam Assasin), set up DKIM and SPF... it's not difficult but there's a long list of things to do.

If you're doing it just for yourself, exim, spamd and mutt are enough. But I wouldn't want to be responsible for a larger installation with regular, non-technical users.

It's not just the configuration, your service will always be subpar. At least until there's a good webmail (I have high hopes for Mailpile).

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I don't know what you're doing then, because I run postfix+procmail+mutt and nothing else and it is zero maintenance and hardly any config. I don't use DKIM or SPF or SpamAssassin. All I have is a RBL client restriction and recipient/helo restrictions. I get possibly one spam a week and I can deal with that manually and I post to a lot of lists.

I've also built a couple of very large mail clusters (full 42U rack sized, 20+ machines) for ISPs before running courier, sendmail and procmail and it's really not that much management or effort to get it off the ground. The real bugger is getting a management front end on it all (postfixadmin doesn't cut it on that scale so it's LDAP time which isn't much fun).

I've rather horribly dealt with Exchange (2000, 2003) and that's just a whole pile of pain. My noble Exchange battling colleagues inform me that it still stinks.

If it's so easy, I am sure you have your own article detailing how you did it, right?

Also, you spam statistic sounds way off for a setup that doesn't explicitly deal with spam.

Yeah here you go on Debian. I just pasted this from my notes and added some formatting...

   == set up mutt ==
   $ sudo apt-get install mutt
   $ echo "export EMAIL=user@domain.com" >> ~/.profile
   $ source ~/.profile
   
   == postfix ==
   $ sudo apt-get install postfix
     .. answer system mail name as your host name
     .. add your domain to domains to accept email for
   .. Follow instructions here WRT SPAM:
      https://wiki.debian.org/Postfix#anti-spam:_smtp_restrictions
      .. basically add two lines to /etc/postfix/main.cf
   $ sudo service postfix restart
   $ ufw allow 25 # allow smtp in firewall. I use ufw.
   .. add your hostname as the MX for your domain (I use 123-reg)
   .. Visit mxtoolbox.com and check the machine isn't an open relay and is functioning correctly

   == procmail ==
   $ sudo apt-get install procmail
   .. add following to /etc/postfix/main.cf
      mailbox_command = /usr/bin/procmail -f- -a "$USER" 
   $ sudo service postfix reload

   == root alias ==
   $ echo "root: youruseraccount" >> /etc/aliases
   $ sudo newaliases

Done.

I genuinely get virtually no SPAM. RBLs and postfix sender validation above seems to work pretty well on its own.

I've done the same on OpenBSD with OpenSMTPd and spamd with even less effort.

I run my own mail server and it's essentially zero work. I have postfix, dovecot, SpamAssassin, and RoundCube, all authenticated via LDAP.

It required some upfront configuration, but it has run itself with minimal configuration changes and 'apt-get' updates for almost 6 years now. I never touch it, and it works.

> It's not just the configuration, your service will always be subpar. At least until there's a good webmail (I have high hopes for Mailpile).

That assumes that user's want to primarily use webmail. In this renaissance of Mac OS X mail clients and mobile phones, that hasn't been the case here.

LDAP does make things a little easier but how do you synchronize stored e-mails and filtering rules between servers?

Why do you need to?

when using dovecot you can use dsync: http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Tools/Dsync

dsync seems to stop working properly after a while for some reason, the usual solution is to upgrade it, which implies a compile from source. after a while it's a pain to keep all these packages up to date.

i am using it in production (debian wheezy package, version 2.1.7-7 now) and it works pretty reliable. do you have a link to a bug report? i kind of depend on it atm, so i'd like to know its bugs.

LDAP is used for storing the Postfix configuration "databases": users, aliases, transports, etc.

It was a pain in the butt to set up, but it has been basically hands-free ever since.

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