-----Original Message----- From: Brett Russ Sent: Monday, March 19, 2007 1:37 PM To: Worcester Linux Users Group Subject: Re: [Wlug] Mail problem for a Monday morning
Oh, in that case, simply explain to her that you couldn't reply to her because your IMAP MUA wasn't properly setup to tunnel SMTP traffic via SSH and all your attempts were just ending up in /dev/null! Hiding information is not a healthy start to a new relationship you know...
;-)
Excellent advice! She'll see that I need someone to look after me and she'll take pity on me. :)
-----Original Message----- From: John Stoffel Sent: Monday, March 19, 2007 2:27 PM To: Worcester Linux Users Group Subject: Re: [Wlug] Mail problem for a Monday morning
Umm... if you can get into your home mail server via SSH, why can't you send email from there using plain old 'mail' command?
Or do you have something similar to what I have, which is my own domain, which gets my email and then dumps it into my ISP's email system for pulling down?
The problem with setting up a reliable server that you never have to mess with is you forget how you set it up. :) I set up a virtual mail domain, and the mail users of that domain don't have shell accounts, so I can't log in as one of those users at the SSH (shell) prompt. I thought that would be more secure, because I might want to give email accounts to friends who would have no need for a shell account.
In that case, using my ISP's outgoing email servers was problematic, because they didn't like me using my @stoffel.org domain email address on outgoing email. Or at least they didn't like it much, and people further downstream started dropping/bouncing my emails thinking I was a spammer.
Yeah, I thought about forging the from: header for certain emails, but I figured my employer's ISP would block that (it *should* block that, anyway). Plus, knowing me, I'd forget to change it back after I sent the email, and then I'd be sending out business emails with my personal email in the from: header. I don't think my company would appreciate that.
So now I have postfix at home setup to use SMTPS to send all outgoing email via my domain's ISP's mail server, encrypted and all is good again.
But basically, can you explain your setup in more detail please? It's not clear where the bottleneck really is.
I'm running Courier-IMAP and...I forget what else...at home. I added an account to Outlook at work to check my mail. It can receive mail fine, but sent messages just sit in the "outbox" forever. I tried telnetting into my server: port 143 gets me the IMAP prompts like you'd expect, but port 25 gets nothing, so I figure my employer is blocking port 25. That's not surprising. My mailserver runs richardklein.org as a virtual domain, and users @richardklein.org don't have shell accounts. If I SSH into my shell account it reports no mail because all my mail gets sent to the @richardklein.org user(s).
Richard> What are my options? Can I use putty to tunnel SMTP through Richard> port 22 SSH?
Not ideal in my mind, since you're trying to make work act like your home system. Which as we get more and more mobile in our professional lives, isn't a good idea in my mind any more.
Heck, I'm reading this from work, but I'm ssh'd into my home system and all the processing and such is happening within a 'screen' session using Emacs and the mail reader 'vm'. All text based, and quick and easy to write/read/edit emails.
I like GUIs for reading email, but the real problem is that mail users don't have shell accounts on my server.
Richard> One of these days I'll set up webmail and this will be a moot Richard> point, but I'm hoping for a quicker, more immediate solution.
Blech. Why is the web the answer to all questions now? *grin* And of course you would make sure to only allow HTTPS connections to your squirrelmail web mail server running on your home machine, right?
I greatly prefer IMAP to webmail, but yeah, if I ever get around to installing squirrelmail, it'll only accept HTTPS connections. -- Rich