[PLUG] Home Linux Box - Google Apps for email

[Mike Chirico <mchirico@gmail.com>]

Using a combination of EveryDNS.net (http://www.everydns.net/) and
Google Apps (http://www.google.com/a/), you can host a local website
on your home Linux box; yet, send and receive email for your
registered domain at Google. Yes, recipients see mail coming from your
registered domain and not gmail. Although, you can can do this for just
gmail - if you don't have a registered domain.

This is free, as in it doesn't cost anything. 


EveryDNS:

This service provides dynamic DNS resolution. So if you're using
Comcast or Verizon and your IP address changes, DNS record information
will get updated automatically by a Perl script running on your local
Linux box. This service also allows you to point just the MX record to
Google. Yeah, it's also free.


Google Apps:

For up to 5G, per email account, per domain the service is free. So
that's 100*5G=500G of storage that you can get for free at Google. You
can download email as soon as it arrives for unlimited email.

Advantages: 

a. Can relay mail from your Linux box to Google with less
chance of having to worry about a blocked IP address via Spamhaus
and SORBS. This could be an issue with email coming directly from
your Comcast or Verizon address.

b. Leverage Gmail's spam filtering for incoming email.

c. IMAP and POP services

d. You can use your domain. You don't have to use gmail. See my example
with cwxstat.org using Postfix.


If you're using Postfix, you may want to reference the following link.

http://souptonuts.sourceforge.net/postfix_tutorial.html

Note - The link is a bit dated. Recent versions of Postfix don't
require running a second instance of Postfix, for more than one email
account. Instead, you can make use of sender_dependent_relayhost_maps.

A quick configuration is shown below. The following was for the domain
cwxstat.org. Note that individual passwords are needed in the
sasl_passwd file, so this can be a pain if you're doing it for a whole
company. This was taking from a working configuration on
v0.mchirico.org

main.cf: 
relayhost = [cwxstat.org] 
sender_dependent_relayhost_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sender_relayhost


sasl_passwd: 
mchirico@cwxstat.org mchirico@cwxstat.org:pASSword1
zchirico@cwxstat.org zchirico@cwxstat.org:passwor2
achirico@cwxstat.org achirico@cwxstat.org:pAsswwword3
lchirico@cwxstat.org lchirico@cwxstat.org:Klp3942mmmM 
root@cwxstat.org zchirico@cwxstat.org:bumppy93MMlm


transport: 
cwxstat.org smtp:[cwxstat.org]


sender_relayhost: 
#format: sender-address relayhost
mchirico@cwxstat.org [cwxstat.org] 
zchirico@cwxstat.org [cwxstat.org]
achirico@cwxstat.org [cwxstat.org] 
lchirico@cwxstat.org [cwxstat.org]
root@cwxstat.org [cwxstat.org]


Note below, my Linux box is v0.mchirico.com, and I don't have a
mchirico account on this box. But, I want all chirico email to be sent
as mchirico@cwxstat.org

generic:
chirico@v0.mchirico.com         mchirico@cwxstat.org
root@v0.mchirico.com            root@cwxstat.org
achirico@v0.mchirico.com        achirico@cwxstat.org
zchirico@v0.mchirico.com        zchirico@cwxstat.org
lchirico@v0.mchirico.com        lchirico@cwxstat.org


The necessary setting for fetchmail can be found
at the following link:

http://souptonuts.sourceforge.net/postfix_tutorial.html


Hope this helps someone,

Mike Chirico


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