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Mail Server
One day, I'll be able to write this up for DigitalOcean, and get some credit for my account: Write For DigitalOcean Share Your Technical Expertise!. But that's gong to take too long!
Why You May Not Want To Run Your Own Mail Server
All I want (right now) is to be able to send emails (from applications), and to send/receive on my own address using mutt
. Nothing that clever, postfix should be sufficient!
Prerequisite(s)
Having already configured an email server previously (see some extra notes below), I'd already setup DNS records, similar to in this guide:
- See sections “Setting up DNS” & “Verify DNS”: How To Set Up a Postfix E-Mail Server with Dovecot
Installation
Start off following instructions from the DigitalOcean Community Documentation How To Install and Configure Postfix on Ubuntu 20.04.
Note, postfix was already installed, so I needed to run:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure postfix
I followed the instructions up to the point of installing s-nail
, I prefer mutt
.
sudo apt-get install mutt
mutt
worked right away, sending an email to my personal email account, and receiving a reply from it.
Testing & Checking
Sent a test email to: Test sender TLS.
<html lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <title>SUCCESSFUL</title> </head> <body> <p>SUCCESSFUL <a href="https://www.checktls.com/TestSender">//email/test <b>From:</b></a></p> <p>Your email was sent securely using TLS.</p> </body> </html>
Useful Tricks
In mutt
to bounce (forward) an email to another address (say a HTML email forward to a regular mailbox), press b
when the email is selected and then put the address into the application and hit enter.
Mixed Links
Documentation
- DigitalOcean Community Documentation (e-mail) 20.04:
- DigitalOcean Community Documentation (e-mail) Original:
Various links used in debugging under older installation
- Suppresss “~/Mail does not exist” in mutt. Just create the dir and have done with it.
- How do I change the hostname without a restart? -
sudo hostname roman-halliday.com
Email server testing site: