Running Home-based mail server, but ISP blocks port 25?

[John Abreau]

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What are we trying to accomplish here? Is this to run a mail server just 
for one household's personal mail, or are we talking about operating a
full-blown service to provide mail accounts and/or mailing lists for 
a significant community?

If it's just for personal use, it may be easier to do what I'm doing. 
I have an external mail server that I can ssh to, and I configured 
my mail client to use a different delivery program in place of sendmail. 
Instead of passing outgoing messages to /usr/sbin/sendmail, it passes 
them to /home/jabr/bin/mysendmail, where mysendmail is a one-liner:

    #! /bin/bash
    ssh asgard '/usr/bin/nc localhost 25'

This assumes I can ssh to asgard without a password; I use ssh-agent 
to enable that. The script connects to asgard and runs netcat to pass 
the outgoing message to the smtp port via asgard's loopback interface, 
which means I don't have to open up relaying to all customers of 
whatever ISP-of-the-month I happen to be using.

For incoming mail I use fetchmail tunneled over ssh, which again is 
fairly straightforward:

    # .fetchmailrc
    poll asgard with proto IMAP auth ssh
        plugin 'ssh %h /usr/sbin/imapd'

All this needs is an external shell account you can ssh to on a machine
you can send and receive mail from. 


- --
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
Email jabr at blu.org / WWW http://www.abreau.net / PGP-Key-ID 0xD5C7B5D9
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