E-mail on your own box

[Joseph Norton]

Hi Brent:

What happened with you getting "unexpectedly terminated?"  Sounds ominous.

Anyway, here's a little info that may be helpful, sorry if I'm being
redundant.

As you know, it is possible to send and receive mail on your own Linux box
with the aid of services like dynodns.net, tzo.com or yi.org as long as
your isp doesn't block access to or from your machine on ports 25 and 110
(to name just 2 of them).  Sending mail is usually no problem unless
something goes wrong (like the message being deferred) that keeps it in
your mail queue.  Receiving is a bit more ticklish as you need some
machine to store your mail when you're off-line.  When you're on-line,
again, it's probably ok as long as the mail server trying to communicate
with you can access your machine on port 25.  If you're off-line and no
other machine is mapped as a secondary mail exchanger, the messages people
send to your machine will be deferred at best, and bounced at worst.

I don't know if dynodns.net offers any solution for this, but, tzo.com
does offer a service (unfortunately they charge around $60 for 5 megs of
storage per 6 months) which will take mail for
<whatever at yourmachine.tzo.com> or <whatever@[yourmachine].yourdomain.com>
if you have a domain hosted by tzo.  This is in addition to the charge for
the regular or premium service that does the dynamic domain
redirection.  So, it's a bit costly, but, kind of neat anyway.  I decided
to try it out for six months, but seriously doubt if I'll keep it, so,
it's back to my regular E-Mail address after that.  If your ISP allows you
to send and receive on port 25, Tzo will map the primary mail exchanger
preference to your machine and the next preference to their machine.  When
you're off line and the sending mail server can't communicate with your
machine, it tries the next preference and the machine at Tzo simply takes
the mail and holds it.  When you sign on to Tzo, they dump the mail they
receive to your machine on port 25--to your machine, it looks like regular
messages coming in.  If your ISP doesn't allow you to send and receive on
port 25, you can even have Tzo configured to use some other port to
communicate with your machine's smtp daemon.  Of course, this means that
all mail to your machine must go through the Tzo server even when you're
on-line.  Usually, in this case, Tzo doesn't bother using your machine as
one of the mail exchanger preferences since it probably won't work.  Tzo's
only shortcoming is that you can't configure these preferences after you
set them up--you must call them or E-Mail them with the information.

Hope this helps.

On Fri, 23 Jun 2000, Brent harding wrote:

> That's what I would like to do. I might be switching isps soon, and would
> rather switch everything to that address now before I get terminated
> unexpectedly again.
> I had pine set up to use my local smtp, and it sent as from
> wbth.dynodns.net. Is there a way to make mail wait until I come on, or
> does the mail system fail if the system isn't always there?
> I'm using debian 2.2 potato.