[TriLUG] e-mail server class

[Ben Pitzer]

Robert,

Actually, smarthosting your mail through RR's mail servers isn't the bad
thing that Chris says it is.  Actually, I highly recommend it to alot of
mail server users, because it can solve alot of problems that TriLUG users
have complained about:

1.  Authenticated SMTP.  You can set your box up to do authenticated SMTP so
that you can send through it at any time, no matter where you are, from a
laptop, or even someone else's PC, all without having to worry about leaving
an open relay (something which I hope you've checked to make sure you have
avoided).

2.  It's one step to do smarthosting rather than figuring out the rather
large (and growing) number of ISPs who don't allow mail from potentially
insecure dynamic IP hosts, and adding smarthosting specifically for those.
Many corporations, educational institutions, and ISPs are moving towards
this practice, so leaving your server as it is hurts nothing, and works
fine.

Some might argue that there is a speed/latency issue here, but the fact is
that RR's outbound servers are working just fine these days.  Better than
ever, in fact, and we are going to be doing some rebuilds and tuning in the
coming weeks to improve them even further, and implement outbound spam
filtering, so that if a customer's PC does get infected by a virus, it will
stand a much smaller chance of getting spread to anyone else.

Congrats on the mail server, and good luck with it.  If you're interested in
finding out about open relays (I should hope they talked about that last
Saturday.  Unfortunately, I couldn't attend), go to
http://www.abuse.net/relay.html and put your mail server's IP or hostname
in.  It'll tell you if you have any issues with open relays.  If you do,
someone can help you close it, I'm sure.  Good luck!

Regards,
Ben Pitzer

---------------------------------------------

"Those that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety
 deserve neither liberty nor safety."
 --Ben Franklin--





> -----Original Message-----
> From: trilug-admin at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-admin at trilug.org]On Behalf
> Of Magnus
> Sent: Monday, July 28, 2003 1:33 PM
> To: trilug at trilug.org
> Subject: Re: [TriLUG] e-mail server class
>
>
>
> On Monday, July 28, 2003, at 12:09  PM, kafuin wrote:
>
> > hopefully this message will demonstrate that, thanks to saturday's
> > class, i
> > now have my e-mail server correctly configured.  thank you jtower for
> > the
> > extra bit of help on sunday ;)
>
> Indeed, it *is* working right.
>
> However, after looking at your headers, I think there is some room for
> further improvement.  It looks like you're forwarding all of your
> outbound mail to the RR MTA.  This is only necessary for a few
> braindead ISP's that block incoming mail originating from all broadband
> users.  In Postfix you can set up a transport map so that, for example,
> all mail for *@*.rr.com or *@aol.com gets routed through your ISP's
> relay.  All other mail can go directly from your host to the final
> destination.  This improves transit time, and reduces your dependency
> on the sometimes broken RR servers ("If you want something done
> right...").
>
> Take a look at the thread starting with this message on how to address
> the broken ISP scenario more effectively with Postfix:
>
> http://www.trilug.org/pipermail/trilug/Week-of-Mon-20030331/015384.html
>
> --
>
> C. Magnus Hedemark
> http://trilug.org/~chrish
> PGP Key fingerprint = 984D 9A88 3D60 016F BE01 1506 60FB 85E1 9ABD 96F6
>