domain (especially email) hosting from home

[Paul Lussier]

Greg Rundlett <greg.rundlett at gmail.com> writes:

> I receive my email through rundlett.com, and a healthy dose of spam
> through freephile.com; both of which are externally hosted through a
> web hosting provider that includes email service and easy-to-manage
> web-based administration of user accounts/aliases/forwards and even
> lists.  How would I go about moving those services to my local machine
> (offering email accounts to family too) with the least amount of
> hassle and worry?

It should be a matter of just changing your MX records to point to
your new mail server[1].  Of course, if you're using DynDNS.org[2], be
forewarned, that you can't use your own domain name unless you pay
them for services.

> Is the short answer 'learn sendmail'?  I hope not.  I know that
> there are a variety of SMTP servers, and I'm not sure which is
> favored for simplicity.

I prefer postfix.  It's more modular, easier to configure, and has had
few security problems than sendmail.  It's also easier to understand,
imo.  That being said, sendmail really isn't all that difficult to
configure for a basic e-mail setup like you're talking about.
sendmail.org is the canonical place for help on line, and most google
searches for config directives in the sendmail.m4 result in a point
there.


[1] Of course, this assumes that before you do so, you've set up and
    properly configured your MTA of choice.

[2] Be aware that as soon as you start hosting your own e-mail and
    probably using your own MTA to send mail from, you'll start
    getting rejection messages from the MTAs of domains you connect to
    which blacklist dynamic IP addresses.  For example, anone you send
    to at an aol.com account will require you relay through an MTA
    with a static address.
-- 

Seeya,
Paul