[YLUG] Query about MX records and setting up a new mailserver

[john halewood]

On 07/11/2007, Rob Hall <rob at waylock.co.uk> wrote:
> Would I now modify the A record of mail.foo.net to point at the IP
> address of my Linux server and then modify the MX record of foo.net to
> point to the FQDN of mail.foo.net so that I can send email to
> user at foo.net

 That's perfectly correct, you just have to make sure that your MTA on
mail.foo.net accepts mails for foo.net as well - if it's FC w/sendmail
then IIRC by default it will only accept mail for mail.foo.net. You
have to add foo.net into /etc/mail/local-host-names (and
/etc/mail/relay-domains if you send it on somewhere else).

> I'm also thinking of using Dovecot and Squirrelmail to achieve my needs
> on the Linux server - we don't need anything fancy like shared calendars
> or any of that malarkey so a simple POP3/SMTP server will do us nicely.

Dovecot seems to scale quite happily to a large-ish number of users,
and doesn't tax the server much in terms of resource utilisation, so
you should be fine there. Watch out for squirrelmail though, as it has
had a fair number of security issues recently - just watch out for any
upgrades that might be available (or just shut it down on the external
interface if you only want people to access it inside your network -
same goes for dovecot).

cheers
john