Ask me how I spent my Saturday morning...go on, ask...
Well, if you insist, here's why I spent my morning reconfiguring my whole home email setup.
Yesterday morning, I noticed that my usual morning email supply (in my personal account) was rather sparse. All of the election email, kids grade reports, and daily reminders of stuff, all of it--it was conspicuously absent. After doing some investigation, it became clear that email just wasn't passing from the spam filtering service I use to my home network. After ruling out all other options, I ended up on the phone with Comcast, only to learn that "they're having problems with port 25". Sigh. I decided to let things sit for the day, and hope that they'd get it fixed. I'm tough. I can handle a day without email.
Well, they didn't fix it. After googling for "Comcast port 25", without quotes, it became pretty clear that I wasn't likely to get the problem fixed, and I'd have to work around it. (In brief, they seem to have started blocking all traffic on port 25, regardless of the direction or the purpose. I don't even send mail on port 25, but SMTP does use port 25 to get mail to me.)
I ended up having to configure a new mail server (Postfix) in a Solaris Zone on a system that we have at a colo facility. That system now accepts incoming mail from the spam filtering service and spools it. Then I had to set up a MTA (UWimap), with SSL, of course, to be able to get to that mail. I then set up fetchmail to retrieve that mail and feed it back into the home server, so we can all get our email again, from the home server under the stairs. (Of course, in the process, I sorta set up a mail loop that resulted in 40,000 extra emails for my wife--whoops. Had to fix that too.)
As I was tinkering, my wife asked "what do normal families do in these cases?" Well, I guess they just continue using Gmail or Hotmail or whatever, and life goes on. I dunno. Maybe I've been a geek for too long, but the idea of not running my email service myself just seems odd.
Although today, I'm thinking I might want to give that a try.
i have a similar situation at home and ended up using NO-IP services. I already used their Dynamic DNS services so it was just a matter of paying another extra 10 dollars or so (I forgot) and use their 'email reflector' service. They receive email for my domain and then bounce it to my home server on port 587, the alt-smtp port. Comcast said they will not block port 587. hope this helps. Marino
Posted by marino on October 04, 2008 at 11:07 PM MDT #
I used to run an email server.
I used to fight with spam.
I used to add exceptions to route outgoing mail because my dynamic IP was blocked.
Now, it's all on gmail with better spam filtering, search, no blocking. My wife still gets multiple email accounts. I can forward my domain emails to it, easily.
My systems run more securely/faster now too.
Posted by Tom on October 06, 2008 at 08:44 AM MDT #