Email Server(Kinda)

[Agons]

Hello all!

I had this idea today, I currently have a cloud service provider that handles my e-mail server. What they do not do is any spam filtering, what become tedious is having all my laptops/mobiledevices/desktops each having their own spam filtering and folder sorting. I run mostly linux here so syncing those settings is not easy. I was thinking of centralizing the work. I run several small servers at home, what I have never done is an e-mail server. But I don't want the e-mails to go to my server directly. MY ISP isn't that great so I still want my e-mails going to my mail server currently at my cloud provider. What I want to try to accomplish i have effectively a mail box that I can set all my folder/spam settings on that I can connect to from all my devices. That way my e-mails get srted and spam filtered at y home server after it pulls it from my could e-mail server. Then I configure my devices IMAP to connect to my server at home.

 

Anyone done anything like this? my current research only shows if I want to have my mail come directly to this server. Not pulling it from another.

 

Thanks for any advice or Ideas in advance!

[Belgarathian]

13 minutes ago, Agons said:

Hello all!

I had this idea today, I currently have a cloud service provider that handles my e-mail server. What they do not do is any spam filtering, what become tedious is having all my laptops/mobiledevices/desktops each having their own spam filtering and folder sorting. I run mostly linux here so syncing those settings is not easy. I was thinking of centralizing the work. I run several small servers at home, what I have never done is an e-mail server. But I don't want the e-mails to go to my server directly. MY ISP isn't that great so I still want my e-mails going to my mail server currently at my cloud provider. What I want to try to accomplish i have effectively a mail box that I can set all my folder/spam settings on that I can connect to from all my devices. That way my e-mails get srted and spam filtered at y home server after it pulls it from my could e-mail server. Then I configure my devices IMAP to connect to my server at home.

 

Anyone done anything like this? my current research only shows if I want to have my mail come directly to this server. Not pulling it from another.

 

Thanks for any advice or Ideas in advance!

Alternatively you could change cloud service provider and redirect the domain?

 

Would that not be easier.

[Maihym]

Watch out, Hillary Clinton over here.

[Agons]

2 hours ago, Belgarathian said:

Alternatively you could change cloud service provider and redirect the domain?

 

Would that not be easier.

That currently not an option.

[Mark77]

Yeah I do it.  qmail on Linux.  Are you good at unix administration and networking?   You really have to be careful that what you build is secure.

[Agons]

20 minutes ago, Mark77 said:

Yeah I do it.  qmail on Linux.  Are you good at unix administration and networking?   You really have to be careful that what you build is secure.

I'm okay, used to work on the e-mail servers at an old job that was a small ISP. They used qMail on CentOs for the customers. I'm just going to have to brush up. What exactly do you do? I was shooting the Idea with a friend who sugested having an e-mail server use pop3 to download all e-mails from the server then apply all the filtering and folder sorting.

[Mark77]

Yeah I have fetchmail set up in a cron process to retrieve the email from my "other" accounts.  I have a IMAP-SSL daemon (Courier IMAP) running.  And it uses Maildir which is far more stable than the "mbox" format (Maildir stores each email as an individual "file" on the HDD).  I have in excess of 200,000 emails accessible (~20gb worth) so it is quite robust and won't break easily.

 

It works quite well, but you need solid sysadmin skills or you'll drive yourself insane when something goes wrong. 

 

Do yourself a favour and make sure your server has redundant storage at the very least. 

[Agons]

17 hours ago, Mark77 said:

Yeah I have fetchmail set up in a cron process to retrieve the email from my "other" accounts.  I have a IMAP-SSL daemon (Courier IMAP) running.  And it uses Maildir which is far more stable than the "mbox" format (Maildir stores each email as an individual "file" on the HDD).  I have in excess of 200,000 emails accessible (~20gb worth) so it is quite robust and won't break easily.

 

It works quite well, but you need solid sysadmin skills or you'll drive yourself insane when something goes wrong. 

 

Do yourself a favour and make sure your server has redundant storage at the very least. 

I don't have nearly that many e-mails, and the idea is that this is just a redundant server with extra features so to speak. I still will have all my e-mails on the main cloud server they just are not sorted and filtered. that way if they go down or, more likely I will I wont lose all my e-mails.

[roberto++]

11 hours ago, Agons said:

I don't have nearly that many e-mails, and the idea is that this is just a redundant server with extra features so to speak. I still will have all my e-mails on the main cloud server they just are not sorted and filtered. that way if they go down or, more likely I will I wont lose all my e-mails.

So the real problem you are faced with is too much spam in your email?

 

Conceptually, You would want your email server to sit behind a gateway spam filter, to keep your storage space open for your important emails rather than use your precious/costly cloud provider space on spam/junk emails. Unless you have something against your cloud provider or have a really good deal, your decision, moving on.

 

Most ideal, build/get a gateway spam filtering service, redirect DNS to it, then have the service forward the "cleaned" incoming messages to your cloud provider. Then sort/organize emails with the email client of your choosing use IMAP on all your devices.

 

The lack of sleep idea, download the emails all@domain.com to a local email client via POP and keep a copy on the server. use a single email client to filter out the spam, then have a single forwarding rule to a different email account you@domain.com.

 

hopefully something to get inspired on.

 

disclaimer - never done this before, my midnight ramblings on the LTT forums.