Email Server From Home?

C

Carlosinfl

Loves the juice
Joined
Sep 25, 2002
Messages
6,633
OK - I would love to run my email server from home and I think its possible but I have some questions about bumps that have come along.

So email server is up and running. Anyone can send email to my email server but not everyone is accepting email from me for the following reason...

My domain was purchased from 1&1.com.
My ISP is Road Runner with a traditional ISP dynamic IP address.
When you ping my domain (carlwill.com), it resolves to my ISP dynamic IP.
I setup an MX record (I think...???) Please see mx record below

My problem is I can't send email to most web based emails like gmail / yahoo / hotmail simply because my reverse dns resolves back to cfl.rr.com. All I did was purchase a domain from 1&1.com and entered my ISP provided (dynamic) IP.

What can I do to be able to send legit email to common used email systems?

Here is my mx record if it helps anyone better understand my situation and find a solution.

; <<>> DiG 9.2.4 <<>> -t MX carlwill.com
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 29217
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;carlwill.com. IN MX

;; ANSWER SECTION:
carlwill.com. 86400 IN MX 10 carlwill.com.

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
carlwill.com. 172800 IN NS ns57.1and1.com.
carlwill.com. 172800 IN NS ns58.1and1.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns57.1and1.com. 21172 IN A 74.208.2.9

;; Query time: 18 msec
;; SERVER: 70.84.160.11#53(70.84.160.11)
;; WHEN: Sun Jan 20 20:27:42 2008
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 106
 
On sorta a different note you might look into something like this:
http://www.no-ip.com/services/managed_mail/inbound_port_25_unblock.html

Should fix your issue because no-ip becomes the location others see AND it provides redundancy if your connection goes out.

That is one issue with running a mail server at home, if you ever lose your connection or the server goes down or something, all the mail will just disappear or get bounced back to the sender. With that no-ip service they will hold the mail for I think up to 7-days if your server is unreachable.

Not a bad $40 spent IMO.


Part of your problem could be SPF and other things mail servers are now using to verify senders to try and prevent spam.
 
Sending mail from a home Internet connection is likely to flag some anti-spam checks when you send emails.
 
There's Good News and Bad News.
Good News: You're setup to receive in coming all perfect.
Bad News: You're gonna have a tough time finding a way to send out email.

Basically in order to send out emails from your mail server, you're gonna need to find a SMTP relay server. It's a good bet that RR is not allowing you to send out anything due to their user rights policy contract thing you signed up with them. What you're probably going to need to do is signup for a business version of your cable account or find someone running an SMTP server that you can relay email to. Hopefully that clears things up.

Edit:
On that note apparently Dyndns.org offers a relay service...
http://www.dyndns.com/services/mailhop/outbound.html
 
You can also use google to host your email. Definitely easier, unless you really want to host it from your house.
 
ND40oz said:
You can also use google to host your email. Definitely easier, unless you really want to host it from your house.
Click to expand...

Agreed, lots less to worry about, no hardware to maintain, and easy to use.
 
dynamic IPs are instantly blacklisted. There is no way this is going to work.

you could do this with a catchall address and a pop3 system like EFS.
 
Simple- just use RR's smtp server as a Smart Host and forward all outgoing mail through it. RR doesn't require you to authenticate to it. I've done it for 7 years running Exchange on SBS.
 
Definately try the smarthost option like mentioned above. I, too, have setup SBS with Exchange for a number of clients that have "sticky" IPs from cable companies and the quickest/easiest way to get this fixed is to use the smart host. You could easily spend weeks trying to get your dynamic IP off of all the black-lists and you may or may not succeed.

 
Carloswill said:
OK - I would love to run my email server from home and I think its possible but I have some questions about bumps that have come along.

So email server is up and running. Anyone can send email to my email server but not everyone is accepting email from me for the following reason...

My domain was purchased from 1&1.com.
My ISP is Road Runner with a traditional ISP dynamic IP address.
When you ping my domain (carlwill.com), it resolves to my ISP dynamic IP.
I setup an MX record (I think...???) Please see mx record below

My problem is I can't send email to most web based emails like gmail / yahoo / hotmail simply because my reverse dns resolves back to cfl.rr.com. All I did was purchase a domain from 1&1.com and entered my ISP provided (dynamic) IP.

What can I do to be able to send legit email to common used email systems?

Here is my mx record if it helps anyone better understand my situation and find a solution.

; <<>> DiG 9.2.4 <<>> -t MX carlwill.com
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 29217
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;carlwill.com. IN MX

;; ANSWER SECTION:
carlwill.com. 86400 IN MX 10 carlwill.com.

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
carlwill.com. 172800 IN NS ns57.1and1.com.
carlwill.com. 172800 IN NS ns58.1and1.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns57.1and1.com. 21172 IN A 74.208.2.9

;; Query time: 18 msec
;; SERVER: 70.84.160.11#53(70.84.160.11)
;; WHEN: Sun Jan 20 20:27:42 2008
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 106
Click to expand...

I had joined this fourm to let you known, I was going to sugguest you could run a Mail Server without any issues.. I just finally got mine up and running today. I wanted to access my email account through all the PCs on my network through the Web Client instead and installed Email Client. Also have Web Server, Music Media Server, Caller ID Server, File Server, Video Media Server. They're on different systems, but it can be done with out using masking of IP address under no-ip and dyndns org account that needed to be updated otherwise they'll drop you. This always been my case with them.

I've pretty much tested everything that's available online and just one that was what I was looking for with SMTP Server and POP3. It also has Java Email Alerts with Web Mail. Not bad. My ISP kept on loging me off my Web Mail account though them.

Now I am able to get POP3 and SMTP transfers to the users.. SPAM filter works great, very easy to use and professional software..
 
The first thing would be using your isps smtp as a relay if they allow it. After that screws up(we had a few clients using that and it started causing issues after a while) we switched some of them to no-ips smtp forward for areas we couldn't get a static ip. So far it has worked well. We have also been using the no-ip mail mail backup. They are worth the money.
 
I am using POSTFIX as my MTA. Very simple compared to Sendmail or anything else I have seen and is very well documented for almost any distribution.

Works great!
 
I have comcast as my ISP and I use POSTFIX also.

in my /etc/postfix/main.cf file i have a line that states:

relayhost = smtp.comcast.net

this allows me to send outbound mail to anywhere i want because the places like gmail/yahoo/etc trust the comcast smtp server.

just need to find out what road runner's relay host is

found this online; not sure if either will work for you or not.

Road Runner (Hawaii) smtp-server.hawaii.rr.com
Road Runner (San Diego) mail.san.rr.com

from http://www.host45.com/resources/ispsmtps.php
 
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