[Wolves] Mail servers

Adam Sweet adam at adamsweet.org
Tue Sep 16 15:40:29 UTC 2008


Dave Morley wrote:
> Okay this is confusing me now :(  I got Maildir setup nicely now \o/  My
> only issue now is that I can only send messages via my local network.
> While this is probably the most secure method it would be nice to send
> mail when not at home.  Any clues gladly received as to what I've
> missed :)

You probably have a setting which permits mail from your local network,
ie 192.168.1.0/24 or whatever your local lan addresses are. You have 2
choices, one bad but easy and the other hard but the best solution.

The first is to allow either the whole Internet or every address you are
ever going to need to send mail from to relay through your machine. This
is bad and I'm sure you can see why. You'll become an open relay as
there's no hope of ever knowing every IP address you'll use. You could
SSH in and allow each IP your on at the time, but you'll need to allow
SSH from everywhere and it will be a pain in the ass just to send mail.

The other is to set up SMTP authentication, which is harder. You're
using Postfix if my memory servers correctly and I don't know how to do
this in Postfix off the top of my head but I'm sure there are hundreds
of howtos out there, notably on Howtoforge. Be sure to keep a copy of
your existing config before changing anything so you can out it back if
it all goes wrong.

Then again, if you're using Webmin as I recall you might be after Ron's
talk, then maybe Webmin can do this for you.

Remember to allow everything from 127.0.0.1 and optionally your local LAN.

Ad



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