How to create a mail server?

14 risposte [Ultimo contenuto]
deavmi
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Iscritto: 02/19/2015

How would you go by to create a mail server on GNU/Linux or GNU/Linux-libre?

Legimet
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Iscritto: 12/10/2013
deavmi
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Iscritto: 02/19/2015

Thank you.

balitop
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Iscritto: 07/14/2015

Thank you for this post very informative

SuperTramp83

I am a translator!

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Iscritto: 10/31/2014

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeIWD_Dr-Tk

That is for Bunnuntu 14.04 but it might give you an idea. Triskello is based on Bunnuntu 14.04 so the process shouldn't be much different.

EDIT: sorry wrong link. This is the one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAQqxZVaur0

deavmi
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Iscritto: 02/19/2015

Thank you.

lloydsmart

I am a member!

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Iscritto: 12/22/2012

This one, although originally intended for the raspberry pi, is also good and worked on my Debian and Trisquel installations:

https://samhobbs.co.uk/raspberry-pi-email-server

marioxcc
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Iscritto: 08/13/2014

Do you find that it is too hard or too much work to enter your query into a search engine?. You would have found links like the ones the people provided, but faster and without wasting their time.

deavmi
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Iscritto: 02/19/2015

Good point. But the user interaction makes it easier I guess.

strypey
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Iscritto: 05/14/2015

I've only heard of it but there is also the Bongo project, hosted by the Software Freedom Conservancy, is another free server stack for hosting mail and calendar data, but it's still in alpha, so handle with care. Anyone tried it on Trisquel?
http://bongo-project.org/

marioxcc wrote:
"Do you find that it is too hard or too much work to enter your query into a search engine?"

Search engines are a good way to find links, but not much of a recommendation on whether the things linked run well on Trisquel, or even whether or how much they respect software freedom. Asking on a *users* forum gathers a more useful subset of search data, from people posting it voluntarily out of interest. The forum thread documents that data instantly for any other Trisquel user with the same question to look at. When I use a search engine for technical queries, a lot of the most helpful information I find is links to... forum threads ;)

vinzv

I am a member!

Offline
Iscritto: 10/11/2014

Though I haven't tried it myself "mailcow" seems to be kinda simple
especially for people with low knowledge of mailserver configuration:
https://github.com/andryyy/mailcow/blob/master/README.md

doolio
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Iscritto: 12/31/2013

Something to bear in mind before building your own mail server.

http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours

J.B. Nicholson-Owens
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Iscritto: 06/09/2014

name at domain wrote:
> Something to bear in mind before building your own mail server.
>
> http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours

Noting that you appear to be posting from a Google-hosted email account,
I hope this isn't going to turn into an attempt to justify letting spies
(Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, etc.) host services for you (including email).

With regard to email, the aforementioned article says "They show how
it’s complicated to think about privacy and autonomy for communication
between parties.". In late 2013, Eben Moglen, Director-Counsel and
Chairman of Software Freedom Law Center, gave a 4-part series of talks
about the consequences of Snowden's revelations. You can find recordings
of each talk at http://snowdenandthefuture.info/. He has clearly done
significant thinking on this. In part 3 he talks specifically about the
danger of having spies host email services for you but what he says
applies equally well to any other service: (source:
http://snowdenandthefuture.info/PartIII.html)

> Those who wish to earn off you want to define privacy as a thing you
> transact about with them, just the two of you. They offer you free
> email service, in response to which you let them read all the mail,
> and that’s that. It’s just a transaction between two parties. They
> offer you free web hosting for your social communications, in return
> for watching everybody look at everything. They assert that’s a
> transaction in which only the parties themselves are engaged.
>
> This is a convenient fraudulence. Another misdirection, misleading,
> and plain lying proposition. Because—as I suggested in the analytic
> definition of the components of privacy—privacy is always a relation
> among people. It is not transactional, an agreement between a
> listener or a spy or a peephole keeper and the person being spied
> on.
>
> If you accept this supposedly bilateral offer, to provide email
> service for you for free as long as it can all be read, then
> everybody who corresponds with you has been subjected to the bargain,
> which was supposedly bilateral in nature.
>
> If your family contains somebody who receives mail at Gmail, then
> Google gets a copy of all correspondence in your family. If another
> member of your family receives mail at Yahoo, then Yahoo receives a
> copy of all the correspondence in your family as well.
>
> The idea that this is limited to the automated mining of the mail, to
> provide advertisements which you may want to click on while you read
> your family’s correspondence, may or may not seem already louche
> beyond acceptability to you, but please to keep in mind what Mr.
> Snowden has pointed out to you: Will they, nil they, they are sharing
> all that mail with power. And so they are helping all your family’s
> correspondence to be shared with power, once, twice, or a third
> time.
>
> The same will be true if you decide to live your social in a place
> where the creep who runs it monitors every social interaction, and
> not only keeps a copy of everything said, but also watches everybody
> watch everybody else. The result will not only be, of course, that
> you yourself will be subjected to the constant creepy inspection, but
> also that everybody you choose to socialize with there will be too.
> If you attract others to the place, you’re attracting them to the
> creepy supervisory inspection, forcing them to undergo it with you,
> if they want to be your “friend.”
>
> The reason that we have to think about privacy the way we think about
> the other ecological crises created by industrial overreaching is
> that it is one. It’s that we can’t avoid thinking about it that way,
> no matter how much other people may try to categorize it wrongly for
> us.

I strongly recommend the entire series of talks, but this portion seemed
particularly apropos. Running one's own services is a good thing and a
project Moglen has some connection to --
https://freedomboxfoundation.org/ -- aims to make it easier for ordinary
computer users to run their own services and thus not need
centralized/spy-driven services.

doolio
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Iscritto: 12/31/2013

J.B. Nicholson-Owens wrote:
"Noting that you appear to be posting from a Google-hosted email account,
I hope this isn't going to turn into an attempt to justify letting spies
(Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, etc.) host services for you (including email)."

Not at all. It's my intention to have my own mail server too. I was merely highlighting an interesting article from Mako hinting our efforts may be in vain.

Thank you also for the video links I will listen to them with great interest.

J.B. Nicholson-Owens
Offline
Iscritto: 06/09/2014

name at domain wrote:
> Not at all. It's my intention to have my own mail server too. I was
> merely highlighting an interesting article from Mako hinting our efforts
> may be in vain.

Good to hear, thanks for clarifying that.

I don't think the effort is in vain. I think that this is an issue of
making it easy for non-technical users to get the services they need on
a system they can store in their home, maintain (ideally,
automatically), and use in their daily lives as a complete replacement
for the untrustworthy services hosted elsewhere.

I imagine this means we'll need some services to have far fewer options
than most services have today (I imagine it is not difficult to identify
configuration points most people can do without), and these services
will need interfaces that make it trivially easy to deploy (ideally,
click a button to activate the service and that's it). I don't say this
because I think ordinary computer users are stupid, I say this because I
think ordinary computer users want the service and will have no interest
in learning about that service like one would expect a professional IT
administrator to do. It's okay if this means deploying, say, an email
server that doesn't scale up to meet the demands of more than a dozen
users (a large family living together with some guests who show up from
time to time).

I'd also imagine this requires some low-power, low-speed, high-capacity
storage -- perhaps an SSD-based RAID array -- to hold logs and user data
(email, webpages, media files, recent chat/video recordings, etc.). And
a means of letting other users communicate with the home-based setup
(perhaps helping non-technical users get their own domain name and
automatically get set up to use a high-speed home-based Internet
connection so the services will work). This will require some political
work be done so that ordinary home-based high-speed network connections
aren't port blocked; we want users to receive TCP packets on port 25
(SMTP), for instance, precisely because they will be running their own
email server.

Encrypted access and storage would be the default, naturally, in case of
physical storage loss or a home raid. All network connections should be
encrypted (https://letsencrypt.org/ or something functionally equivalent
should be the default). And all updates delivered automatically without
user intervention by default, of course.

And since this would all be implemented with Free Software any user who
wants to dig into the details may do so without voiding a warranty, even
if that means they forgo the after-sale service the device comes with
(it's not reasonable to expect a $100 unit with no ongoing fee to supply
admin expertise akin to what your ISP offers you). And this device
should be available in ordinary stores users already know and use.

If service setup and maintenance continues to require considerable
technical skill, users will keep flocking to services hosted outside
their control. People have a way of mentally accommodating something
once an option is available to them. So it will be up to the
implementers to alter the status quo to meet the public's need.