Help/advice required setting up a local mail server

Kevin O'Connor kevin at ziptek-technologies.co.uk
Fri Mar 19 21:28:26 GMT 2004


In roughly the order you asked the questions
The pop3 smtp is easy to set up and you could also put openwebmail (from
the ports) on so you can pickup your emails from a browser when away
from home.
News server will gets lots of traffic and also some stuff you don't want
the wife and kids within 10 miles of, so I can't recommend that. 
Windows printing, why stop there go the whole way and install samba.
Spam Assassin should be ok to filter your mail, there are a few AV
programs that will run ok on FreeBSD 4.9. As you'll need Apache to run
openwebmail you may as will configure that as a proxy to speed up a few
sites.
Ok about now the HDD is full to over flowing, I don't think a 1.6Gb
drive is going to cut it.

I don't know the ADSL router you have, does it do port redirection? If
not the box will have to have a public IP address for the MX records to
work.
I can't recommend running DNS on it as your ISP servers will do the job
and if they fail so will your ISPs network so I see no advantage there.
LOL there are so many options that the answer is not for an email but a
weekend down the pub with a few ppl off the list.
Hope this helps a bit and we have not even mentioned firewalls yet
Kevin

-----Original Message-----
From: freebsd-users-admin at uk.freebsd.org
[mailto:freebsd-users-admin at uk.freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Mark Ovens
Sent: 19 March 2004 16:55
To: FreeBSD Users
Subject: Help/advice required setting up a local mail server

I guess there's plenty of people here who have this setup so it seems 
like the best place to ask for advice and/or pointers to URLs with 
useful info.

After building a new machine for a friend she has offered me her old one

if I have a use for it. AFAICR it is a 300MHz Cyrix 586, 32Mbyte RAM, 
1.2Gbyte HDD. This seems to be an ideal machine for implementing an idea

I've been toying with for a while now, which is to setup a local POP3 
server.

The reason for this is primarily the control of spam which has reached 
ridiculous levels. I have several e-mail accounts and the rest of the 
family have one each. I use Mozilla Thunderbird so I just d/l everything

from my accounts and let T-bird's spam filtering deal with it (>95% 
accurate). The rest of the family use OE (for a reason) so I have spam 
trapping enabled on their accounts on the ISP's server. The problem is 
that it doesn't catch everything and I have to remember to check it all 
(via the web mail interface) on a regular basis. My wife finds a lot of 
the spam offensive and I want to protect my kids from it.

I reckon that a local POP3 server that pulls the mail for all the 
accounts and the users get their mail from this would give me better 
control and allow customized spam filtering plus have it send me daily 
e-mails to remind me to do the vetting (which I could also do quicker 
locally).

So, I plan to put 4.9 on this machine and a POP3 server (qpopper?) but 
it has occurred to me that I could also run a News server, SMTP server 
(my ISP allows this, they just test for an open relay before unblocking 
port 25), and DNS server.

I would also like to do e-mail virus scanning on this machine if this is

possible under FreeBSD rather than on each individual machine (one of my

machines got hit by the Netsky worm after Norton stopped auto-updating 
for some reason still to be resolved).

What are the advantages and/or disadvantages of running local SMTP, 
News, and DNS servers, and what s/w would people recommend?

My current network has a Zyxel ADSL modem/router with a static IP 
running NAT, my own two machines, plus my company laptop (most of the 
time - I work from home) all connected through a Netgear 5-port switch. 
Would this new server work just added to this network (i.e. with a 
192.168.x.x IP address) or would it need to be Internet-facing (I can 
get 8 static IPs from my IP), which I suspect may be necessary for DNS? 
In which case should I turn off the firewall in the router and set this 
new machine up as a firewall as well?

Finally, can a FreeBSD machine act as a network print server for Windows

machines? My printer is a Lexmark X83 (USB) all-in-one which I think is 
a GDI device (Winprinter) and my main machine that it is connected to 
dual-boots XP and -CURRENT. At the moment the other machine can only use

the printer when it is running XP. I was going to get a network print 
server but if I add this new server I'll run out of ports on the switch.

Sorry for the long e-mail but I wanted to give as much info as possible.

TIA

Regards,

Mark



------ FreeBSD UK Users' Group  -  Mailing List ------
http://listserver.uk.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-users





More information about the Ukfreebsd mailing list