[Cialug] E-mail

[Thomas Kula]

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 09:25:02AM -0500, Daniel A. Ramaley wrote:
> For those who own their own domains, what do you do for e-mail services?

I have two parts to my mail infrastructure.

The first part are two virtual machines hosted through two
providers of such things. These host the authoritative DNS
for all of my domains, and are the listed MXen for all of
my domains. I like having these Out There --- even if all
of my stuff dies, there is still enough left to queue up
e-mail, which I consider the most important thing. These
all run postfix, because I've pretty much figured out how 
to beat postfix into submission so I see no reason to 
change. But pretty much any MTA you can beat into submission
should work just fine.

Second, on a VM in the machine I have in colocation I run
the Cyrus IMAP software. I picked Cyrus because it integrates
very well with the kerberos authentication setup I have ---
I'm a big fan of being able to ssh into my Workstation of
Persistent State and being able to run mutt and have my 
cached credentials authenticate me to the imap server. I
can also run Mulberry on my OS X laptop and the same thing
happens, my cached credentials authenticate me. This also
has a neat side effect: since I can also make Pine work
the same way, users of mine who used to run Pine on a
machine with a local spool file still do exactly the same
thing, they type "pine", and their kerberos credentials
log them in, without prompting them to enter a password
again. They really noticed no change.

Note, Cyrus is a closed store system --- users can not log
on to the machine and directly access their mail spool, it
is all through IMAP. This doesn't bother me at all, because
systems where you can do that seem kinda crufty to me.

Other than that, sitting in there is Postgrey for greylisting
and spamassassin for despamification. It pretty much just
works --- every so often I go kick spamassassin to make it
work better, but for the most part it keeps spam down to
a dull enough roar that I don't care. 

No part of my mail infrastructure physically lives in my
apartment. I'm fortunate in having found decent enough
and inexpensive enough colocation that I don't have to
worry about the thin strand AT&T provides me to the rest
of the world, or the occasional power outage SE Michigan
likes to have, or moving. The savings each month in my
power bill pretty much pays for that (although, moving
from a dozen tossed away ISU boxes to one Real Machine
and doing virtualization also considerably dropped my
power bill).


-- 
Thomas L. Kula | kula at tproa.net | http://kula.tproa.net/
Mathom House in Midtown, The People's Republic of Ames