Basher52 wrote:My connection is not ADSL so I have no modem for that.
I have a RJ45 outlet in the wall were I get 10Mbit FD and my ISP have no responsibility for any virus checking or to ban any ports at all so everything is wide open unless I say so.
As I said, the big question would be whether or not the IP address you use on your server is a static IP address or a dynamic IP address. If it's static then you should be golden. If it's dynamic you are going to have many problems, believe me, I know from experience. You will have 2 major problems. The first is every time your IP address changes you'll have to change your MX record (or have some dynamic way of changing it via dyndns, noip, etc). The bigger problem is that you will likely be part of many RBL lists because you are in a dynamic IP range and many mail services and companies will automatically block you or if they don't block you they will throw you in the spam bucket.
Just to cut cost I'm gonna have only one server for all applications and that is: iptables, mail server, and later a web server.
I know that to put a mail server on the same hardware as a web server is not very good practise, but what can an old poor guy do :P
There is no problem setting this up like you want.
I want to be able to use some client like Thunderbird (or Outlook Xpress :evil: ) to connect to the server and read/send mail, this is due to the fact that my sister has to be able to read/send mail from the server later when it's "in production".
Once you get mail coming into your server you would install dovecot for this as cghgold mentioned earlier. This is an extremely simple step as all you really have to do is install the package and don't really have to configure anything.
I want to use the best protocol for sending/receiving mail and I always figured that to be smtp, but what do I know :P
Not only is smtp the best, it's the standard and pretty much your only option. That's what everyone else on the net uses for transferring mail between email servers. sendmail provides smtp as I mentioned.
The server itself are just gonna be standing somewhere without much attention unless something happens, so everything has to be accessable by clients on other machines and I guess that 'sis' won't let me install other OS than Windoze for them.
No problem, as mentioned dovecot provides standard pop/imap access which nearly all email clients understand.
Eventhough I've read alot of configuring all these things I just can't get a grasp of all the vocabulary and what they really stand for, so this thing you said about "to point to the host running sendmail" is that the IP address of my server you're talking about?
Yes, you would configure your MX record in DNS to point to the server running sendmail listening on port 25 for incoming messages. Basically you should have an 'A' record configured in your domain for your mail host (mail.yourdomain.com) and the MX record would use that name along with a priority (e.g. '10'). MX records can have more than one host and you set a different priority for each. That way if one is down it will go to the second one. You are only going to have one server though so it doesn't matter what you set the priority to.
I also know that I have to configure 'bind' to setting the domain name up etc. and a buddy at work said that this is essential to get sendmail to work, but I don't know if he by that ment when I've bought the domain and not just in this testing phase.
Actually if you purchase your domain from a registrar like GoDaddy you don't have to run your own DNS (bind) server. You can register all your hosts (including your MX record) in their DNS server which is what I would suggest you do. I have several domains registered with GoDaddy. They are one of the cheapest I know of for domain registrations (well, for .com, .net, and .org anyway).
The MX Record I was talking about is due to the fact that I for now don't own a domain so I figured I would use this free no-ip.biz to setup a domain name and I was thinking I had to forward these MX records to my server's IP address, or am I way off?
So you are not going to register your own domain? No problem, especially if you have a dynamic IP address as I said. no-ip.biz would provide dynamic address updates as long as you are running an update client. They also should have a way to set your MX record. In this case you would have a name like:
basher52.no-ip.biz
You would set your MX to basher52.no-ip.biz (or it may default to that if you don't specifically set it). Then when someone sends a message to
basher@basher52.no-ip.biz the sending mail server will look up the MX record for 'basher52.no-ip.biz' and find that the message should be delivered to the server by the same name and as long as you have sendmail running listening on port 25 on your public IP address and it isn't being blocked then the message should arrive in the user basher's mailbox on your server.
Hope this will clear things up :)
Perfectly other than still not knowing if you have a dynamic address and what distro you are running (I could have you running quickly if you are running Fedora, only because I have configured this same setup you are trying to achieve at least 100 times). As a matter of fact, I have voidmain.is-a-geek.net running on a dynamic cable IP address and have the host registed through dyndns.org (like no-ip). If you send a message to
voidmain@voidmain.is-a-geek.net I will get it on my server running sendmail that is listing on port 25 on that address, and then in turn read it in my email client using imap to read the mail on the server. I currently have everything here at home on Fedora Core 6.
) to connect to the server and read/send mail, this is due to the fact that my sister has to be able to read/send mail from the server later when it's "in production".
I seem to have forgotten the distro
