hoffies blog

With some help from darix I finally managed to get postfix with virtual aliases from text files + dovecot (instead of courier-imap) with virtual users working! \o/

I always thought I was using the IDLE extension for IMAP in Thunderbird but that does not seem to be the case, because courier-imap did not support it (maybe I just misconfigured it, who knows). With dovecot I get notifications about new mails immediately... When I send a mail to myself the mail appears even before Thunderbird is able to close the ‘Sending mail’ window! And dovecot seems to much faster when copying/deleting/moving emails as well. :)

Tomorrow I’ll do the web part which is going to be more fun I think, but today I certainly learned a lot about postfix. I was backed up by some howtos though, namely http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_postfix_virtual_hosting and the dovecot wiki

And btw I also installed DSPAM (which replaces the previous memory hog amavis + clamav + spamassassin…) using http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Spam_Filtering_with_DSPAM_and_Postfix—I don’t know if it is working yet as darix gave me some postfix rules which already prevent a lot of spam senders from successfully connecting:

smtpd_sender_restrictions = reject_unknown_sender_domain
smtpd_client_restrictions = permit_sasl_authenticated, permit_mynetworks, reject_unknown_client
smtpd_helo_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, reject_invalid_hostname

Yesterday I wanted to set up mailman… and have still not been able to get it working. This server is completely messed up. I’m running SysCP (patched for lighty support) and now I realize that it’s overkill for me. I have 7 “customers” in SysCP while 5 of them are mine… I have absolutely nothing against SysCP, it’s a nice tool for webhosting, but for me it has just become annoying. The lighty config file with my custom changes grows and grows and it will probably be longer than the automatically generated one by SysCP once… that doesn’t make sense. The only reason which made me keep using SysCP was the mail setup (postfix + courier-imap using mysql) because I hardly had any knowledge about it. I don’t claim to have much more now but I think I will try to replace courier-imap by dovecot and start a postfix config from scratch. Additionally I’ll kill lighty-1.4 and replace it by lighty-1.5 with external spawned fastcgi servers.

So, if any services on this server do not work in the next hours/days, don’t be surprised. :)

Maybe I can get a working mailman setup then…