Ramblings of Narc

In keeping with the previously mentioned tip about getting stuff done, I’m now starting to work on a problem I’ve been avoiding for several months — moving the mail server.

First part, setting up Postfix on bast to be authoritative for narc.ro, and do all the things my current mail server does. Will it end well? Watch this space, updates forthcoming as progress inevitably ensues (possibly with hilarity; most likely not). Current time: 2:34 am.

Update: 5:15 am and I have Postfix doing most of the important stuff. Counting them:

• receiving mail on the catch-all
• receiving forwarded mail from gmail
• not being an open relay — from default config, so not taking credit for it
• receiving mail on various blackhole accounts — and sending them straight to /dev/null

What isn’t there anymore:

• SpamAssassin. No great loss for me, as the only thing it was doing was marking emails as spam. My main filter has always been the blackhole.
• DNS Blacklists. Also no great loss, for the same reason as above. Further, I’ve heard it’s pretty easy to get on one of them, but very hard to get off them. So, no problem.
• SSL/TLS — wasn’t in use, since SMTP is secured by the anti-relay setup, and POP3 isn’t even open to the Internets. If someone (like me) wants to get their mail remotely, they can tunnel through SSH. And I can, have done, and will continue to do so.
• SPF/DomainKeys/etc. Same argument as above: not in use.
• Antivirus. Never received a virus in email. Don’t have any clueless users. So, no need.
• POP3 “forwards”. This might be a problem, as I did have a couple of email accounts I was fetching mail from using POP3. OTOH, the single important emails getting delivered to that account can be redirected through GMail, whose forwarding works fine. Come to think of it, I can have GMail fetch the emails remotely, and get those spiffy spam filters in on it, too! Not bad.

So, in conclusion, there’s not much I’m missing, and in exchange, I now have a much freer computer that I can power down at night and install Ubuntu on (when I can find some space for a complete backup). Very very good trade.