You do not need a post office
If you want to host your own mailboxes to complete your internet hosting setup, think again. When you have arrived at a decision to host, think again. Repeat that until you give up. You might be wondering why I am so against your hosting mailboxes. Well, I am not against it. I feel that there is no necessity for an Athena host to set up a complete mail system. You might want to visit the Mail Transport Agent page on Linux guide for more information on mail servers.
You only need a postman
You only need to send mails containing activation keys to users of your forum site or Athena server. A SMTP server will get the job done. There are free SMTP servers in the net. Get the simplest one you can find.
Before you begin
Do yourself a favour, be sure that your ISP is not blocking port 25.
On your own
I will leave you with the following information to help get your SMTP server installed and working, if you must give it a shot:
- host = 127.0.0.1 or 192.168.1.101
- server = 127.0.0.1 or 192.168.1.101
- port = 25
- domain = local machine or local domain
- sendmail account = admin@myhost
-
where myhost is the name which you want others to know, e.g. name of your Athena server or name of your forum site. Warning: do not change the port number.
Tertiary domain?
Theoretically, you can use your dynamic DNS domain in place of myhost. Caution: use your valid email as the reply to address. If you do not know how to set the reply to address, do not use your free DNS domain. You might get your free DNS service suspended if your provider is spammed from your IP or they get tired of handling your undelivered mails, which are returned to their mail servers.
If port forwarding has been done, your SMTP server will be delivering mails on port 25 of your public IP. It should also accept mails but that is beyond the scope of this guide.
Q&A
Any alternative to SMTP server?
You can use your ISP email account to send mails to your users. In this case, your mail account should be one on a SMTP/POP3 server. You can also use phpmailer which function like a mail transport agent.
What should I watch?
There are many people who will register with fictitious email addresses. Those might eventually land your IP on a blacklist of a spam blocker. You should configure you SMTP server to stop delivering mails after a certain number of attempts or length of time. You should also disable the relay option. Caution: Your ISP might block your server ports or suspend your account if your host is found spamming.
Should I set up a SMTP server?
I would still advise against setting up of any mail server unless you are absolutely sure of what you are doing. A mail server is not something you use to prove your technical prowess. The responsibility is far too great to for it to be considered worthwhile. It is also not cheap to set up regulation-compliant mail servers. You read right, it is not singular. You need two servers of different MX priority, meaning a main and a backup. If you are hosting an Athena server with high user registration turn-over, you should consider using SMTP server in conjunction with ROCP to control registration flood.
I still want to host mail servers...
For a start, register a top-level domain and get a static public IP. Then read about Linux because you are going to need it. Alternatively, pay for Windows Server 2003 or buy a commercial mail server suite for Windows XP. However, money can not buy you knowledge, you still have to read about Active Directory, SMTP and POP3. You should be quite ready when you have gone through all that.
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