[ale] mail server with dynamic IP?

Tim Watts tim at cliftonfarm.org
Thu Jan 20 09:54:02 EST 2011


Thanks Chuck. Yeah, I'm getting bearish on the whole "home mail server"
idea. It's much more involved than a web server and seems to require
redundancy to be viable.

I may look at what aSmallOrange.com has to offer, as Paul suggested. The
unmovable requirement for me is keeping my email address. Whether that's
hosting mail on my own VPS, using another mail hosting service or
finding a more reliable forwarder doesn't really matter to me. But the
VPS sounds like the more interesting approach. It has to be cheap
though. I'm paying $40/yr now for the forwarding and I'd really rather
not go above that.

Privacy is important to me as well -- more on principle than anything.
In that regard my confidence in google is pretty low.


On Thu, 2011-01-20 at 06:38 -0500, Chuck Peters wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 7:21 PM, Tim Watts <tim at cliftonfarm.org>
> wrote:
>         I'm losing confidence in the mail forwarding service I use and
>         am
>         thinking of dropping it. This may be just the excuse for me to
>         set up my
>         own mail server at home, which is a project I've wanted to do
>         for a long
>         time. But here's the thing: I don't have a static IP address.
>         Would this
>         be a horribly foolish thing to embark on if I don't?
> 
> Friends don't let friends host mail servers on dynamic DNS!  You might
> get it to work, but it will bite you when you don't have time to deal
> with it and you will lose mail.
> 
> If it isn't too much network transfer I could host it from my linode
> VPS provided you agree not to spam people or do those annoying
> forwards so many people do... And I am sure others on the list could
> do it as well.  How much mail transfer per month do you have?  
> 
> You can also use Google Apps Partner Edition to host it for free, and
> it has quite a good web interface and great spam filtering.  We use it
> for StarrySkies.net mail and have a number of people using it.  And I
> also have my dear old mom using it and I have provided her mail as
> well as others since 95/96.  If we were not running mailman and
> wordpress I would consider not running mail servers anymore and host
> it all at Google, the service is that good.
> 
> It appears you are using dyndns to forward mail to your
> Mindspring/Earthlink DSL, aka dynamic IP.  It would work better to
> host it on Google or a VPS and use a client to download the mail,
> getmail4 to your local machine or your regular client Evolution.  And
> continue to send out mail through Earthlink like you are now, through
> a properly configured VPS or Google.
> 
> 
> Chuck
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