[Computer] E-mail

[marcmagus]

In the past I've had trouble configuring my computers both to send mail out to the internet and to deliver locally generated mail locally*. The problem is that I've been trying to use little lightweight MTAs like ssmtp and msmtp. This time I went ahead and did a Postfix installation.

I followed the guide at the Gentoo Wiki. It was easy and it works. It's possible that some ISPs will reject my mail because it comes from a dynamic IP (coming, as it does, from a computer sitting on our home network which gets its IP from our cable company). If this becomes a problem, they have nice directions for having Postfix route the mail via your ISP, which I figure I should be able to use to get it working.

A nice side benefit of this setup is that, being a full-blown MTA, I can theoretically ditch Gmail and give myself an email address at my domain (available thanks to dynamic DNS from DynDNS). I'm not sure I want to do that just yet...I'd be trading off not having to let Google snoop my mail for a downgrade in delivery reliability (if the network connection goes down, or the power goes out at home, or the IP changes and the DNS takes a while to propagate, or one of my housemates chokes the bandwidth on the connection, or something else interferes with my access). But my quick test did show that I can both send and receive mail directly. (If anybody wants to help me play with that a little, let me know.)

* (For those who don't know, a lot of *NIX system processes which run quietly in the background will send an email to the machine administrator when something goes wrong. If the thing which went wrong involves the network connection, it's useful for one of the places this mail gets delivered to be local to the machine.)