[TUHS] Who is running their own mail server and what do you run?

Jon Steinhart jon at fourwinds.com
Thu Sep 21 07:26:32 AEST 2017


Bakul Shah writes:
> 
> 
> > On Sep 20, 2017, at 9:39 AM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
> > 
> > I run my own server using sendmail.  Part of what makes it work is an accretion
> > of crud that I have hooked to it over the years which I wouldn't particularly
> > suggest to anyone else.
> > 
> > So yes, spam is a big problem.  I manage it in a crude but effective way.  I
> > have a milter (mail filter) that I cobbled together that is invoked by sendmail.
> > I also have a separate "spam" user.  What the milter does is to take anything
> > that it considers to be spam and rewrites the address so that it goes to the
> > spam user.  I have permissions set up so that I can easily check on spam when I
> > have time.  Oh yeah, another of my curmudgeon credentials is that I use nmh for
> > my MUA (I'm a maintainer).
> 
> I use postfix + postgrey. But greylisting doesn't seem to work
> any more. I detect spam using various scripts. As you put it,
> "accretion of crud"!  I block spammer IP addrs via pf.
> Probably not the right thing to do.  Should look into various
> anti-spamming mail filters again. It is trivial to manually
> detect spam so probably should experiment with NN code for
> this.
> 
> I too use nmh (and MH before then). But since my last upgrade
> repl, comp, forw seem to bring up a blank X-MH-Attachment in
> vi.  Used to bring ~/Mail/drafts/<number> file, initialized
> with interpreted contents of "components" or "replcomps" file.
> Haven't gotten around to  looking into this. [This is a
> problem with many "maintained" software packages.  Things
> evolve and if you update only sporadically, you just may miss
> a crucial update or two!]

Um, well, while I am a maintainer I have been too busy to pay attention
to it in the last couple of years.  I am the person who invented/wrote the
attachment code for nmh.  I asked and asked for feedback on the design
before implementing it an received none.  Things were find for about a
decade and then all of a sudden folks had a myriad of complaints and made
a bunch of changes.  My suggestion is that you mention this on their
mailing list after making sure that you have the latest stuff installed.
I do recall that a few changes were made some years back which broke stuff
if one had customized the components files for their own installation.

Jon



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