Help/advice required setting up a local mail server

Martin Smith martin at rakupottery.org.uk
Sat Mar 20 01:00:24 GMT 2004


On Fri, Mar 19, 2004 at 04:55:19PM +0000, Mark Ovens wrote:
> 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.

You will probably find that the processor runs at 233, but that will be fine, I would recommend a new psu and as much ram as you can get into it, I have one the same with 128meg in an office with about 12 users. It runs 4.8 with fetchmail in multidrop mode, postfix and qpopper, I use header checks in postfix to get rid of any executable attachments, and leave them to sort out the spam. You can add leafnode for news. It is an incredibly reliable setup, it just runs. I have port 22 forwarded on their router so I can get to it without going over there.
Quick and easy to set up, satisfying to use and secure, what more do you need? 
If you want to run amavis antivirus you will want a bit more processing power.
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Martin Smith




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