Before I continue my story on email setup, let it be said that I love Amber Radabaugh… or radaba if you ask her to spell it for prom like reasons ;-). Today is our unofficial aniversary. It sounds as if we are going to a movie and perhaps dinner, which should be fun! We went to Rob’s play last night and he did a FANTASTIC job. Compared to some of the MSA play’s I’ve been to… I was shocked. They had a few more resources at this place, but really… They did a very good job.
Now that I’ve updated you on that, let me quickly resume with my email telling tradegy.
So After the frustrations that have been setting up POSTFIX, I decided to go and buy a book. The book has done much good for me in the last 4 hours. It got me to a point where PostFix would compile. It got me to an understanding of how postfix thinks, and beyond all other things it helped me make the jump between sending email, storing email, and delivering email.
I had never realized till today that the systems for sending and getting email weren’t integrated persay. In all truth, they are independant. The server that allows you to get email via POP is generally completely different than the server that you used to send (SMTP) mail. Once I had that cleared up, things became much less confusing.
So to make the long story short, I got 1 email address working. Additional ones take adding a user account and that’s it. Now, that’s now how we want this server setup. We want it set up so that the users are in a DB, the domains are in a DB, and the email if possible, is in a DB. We don’t want millions of users for millions of email addresses. To accomplish this we will have to integrate with mysql. But for now, I’m happy with where I’m at, so I’m going to go join my sweety for a great night out on the town. But before I go, a basic synopsis of what I did:
1) Installed postfix. This was done using a series of ‘make makefile’ and ‘make’ and ‘make install’ commands. It took like 5 in all before I got the configuration settings right so that it would compile. Always make sure you know where your libraries are for say… mysql.
2) Tested the sending abilities of postfix using php. That was easy… A simple mail function.
3) Installed Univerisity of Washings ipop3d server. Not to hard. It defaults to the same location that postfix does for mail delivery.
4) Opened up the stupid port 25 and 110 on the firewall so that the emails could actually get through. Forgetting to do this step managed to again set me back 20 minutes.
5) Sent some emails around until I got them. 🙂
That was the gist of my 5 hours at the computer today. If you have questions, and I know some of you do… email me about it. I will gladly answer them (when I have time of course).
A note on the server naming contest, so far.. Richard has given me the best idea yet… names of starships IE: enterprise, riogrande, voyager… I’m still taking entries, but realize.. the name I am looking for is one that is part of a set of things… IE: cities of lord of the rings, nintendo character names, star trek ship names. Things where I can name the server one thing, and name the second server something similiar. It helps if they have meaning as well IE: bird of prey is the firewall, enterprise is the lead production server, riogrande might be a router, where ds9 might be a database server. Make sense? Again good luck, I’m out for the night. Cya.
Oh, btw: SCHOOLS OUT FOR SUMMER!