{"id":549,"date":"2009-12-30T23:49:53","date_gmt":"2009-12-31T03:49:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/?p=549"},"modified":"2023-11-24T14:02:54","modified_gmt":"2023-11-24T18:02:54","slug":"earning-trust-for-your-email-server","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/2009\/earning-trust-for-your-email-server\/","title":{"rendered":"Earning Trust for Your Email Server"},"content":{"rendered":"

I host my own email server, this in itself is a very odd thing to do in this day and age. \u00a0If you want email to come from your domain, Google offers this for free<\/a> and provides the same interface as Gmail. If you insist on running your own mail server, then setting it up to use your ISP as a smarthost<\/a> is the easy way to go (very easy<\/a> with Ubuntu<\/a>), of course I didn’t take that path.<\/p>\n

As an aside, setting up a mail server that uses fetchmail<\/a> to gather email from the various accounts you have, and using a smarthost configuration to send email does give you most of the benefits of running your own mail server with very few headaches. \u00a0The reason to do this might be that you don’t want to trust Google (or someone else) to hold all your email, and\/or you don’t want the individual PCs in your house to be the storage for your email (hard to migrate to a new machine, recover from disaster). \u00a0This is how I started down the path of running my own true email server. [I keep thinking that someone should create an easy to install NAS<\/a> add-on that provides exactly this type of email server]<\/p>\n

Ok, maybe you don’t want to run your own email server but you’re interested in knowing what is involved… Having a static IP address is handy, mostly to save you from DNS issues. \u00a0While you can manage to have a domain name tied to a dynamic IP, many blacklists<\/a> include the IP ranges used by ISP for dynamic addresses. \u00a0Of course you need a domain name, and a DNS server too. \u00a0You might also want to consider a secondary MX record<\/a>, in case your connection goes down. \u00a0You’ll also want to check that your ISP isn’t blocking port 25<\/a> outgoing, and having a valid reverse DNS<\/a> is important too.<\/p>\n

So you’ve followed the Ubuntu documentation<\/a> and setup a mail server, great. \u00a0Assuming your IP address is “clean” (ie: not on a blacklist), then you can probably send email just fine. \u00a0Until you start hitting problems where spam filters have taken a dislike to your system – in my case it was Rogers<\/a> (email provided by Yahoo<\/a>) that treating my outgoing as spam. \u00a0One solution is to have the recipient add your email address to their address book so they do still get to see your email. \u00a0It may still get tagged as [Bulk] but it won’t get lost. \u00a0This isn’t a great solution for someone new you want to contact, or a friend who isn’t terribly technical.<\/p>\n

It turns out there are some additional measures you can take on the email server side to add more trust. \u00a0There are three I’ve implemented:<\/p>\n