David Rosenstrauch wrote:
On Sat, June 6, 2009 7:01 am, Magnus Therning wrote:
Why do you _need_ an SMTP server? From the sounds of it you could use your ISP's server directly from the laptop via the VPN connection. Either that, or as another poster suggested, use SSH port forwarding to get to the SMTP server.
Well, the way I have my setup configured is that all my email - both in and out - goes through my home server. My server uses fetchmail to grab incoming mail from the ISP, dovecot to provide IMAP capabilities on my server, and exim with smart host forwarding to send mail out. A bit complicated, I know, but this way all my mail is on my home server, not at my ISP, automatically gets backed up, etc.
Still sounds like you don't necessarily _need_ a full-fledged SMTP server at home. You can configure fetchmail to use `deliver`, which comes with dovecot, for the local delivery, at least if you are using per-user fetchmail configs. Then you have to configure all your MUAs to use your ISP's SMTP. I assume you already have all MUAs configured to use your dovecot instance, including saving a copy of sent emails to a folder on it.
The reason I use VPN is because I need to access both SMTP port and IMAP port from the server (as well as SSH). It starts to get to be a pain to set up multiple SSH tunnels.
Using a VPN is arguably easier when you need many to "tunnel" many connections via the same network/computer. However, if your clients have SOCKS support then it might be worth knowing that SSH can act as a SOCKS proxy. Note that I'm not saying you should modify your setup in any way, if it's working and you're happy with it then why "fix" it? It's always good to know about the option though, right? /M -- Magnus Therning (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4) magnus＠therning．org Jabber: magnus＠therning．org http://therning.org/magnus identi.ca|twitter: magthe