How to set up a receiving email server on a Linux machine¶

Context¶

Most of the time, I’m happy with my Gmail. It has nice clients, filters out spam okay, and integrates with Google Calendar. But sometimes, companies will only give me their special content if I pass them my work email. Whether this content is valuable or not is a separate question. Here, I explain the technical solution to getting a mailbox on your custom domain. (Assuming you already host a Linux server on your domain and have access to everything.)

Configure Linux¶

Install and configure postfix
```
sudo apt install postfix -y
```
Configure the hostname and destination in /etc/postfix/main.cf:
```
myhostname = mail.demin.dev
mydestination = $myhostname localhost.$mydomain localhost $mydomain
```
(mydomain is autogenerated from myhostname by removing the first part)
If your username is not the same as the desired email, add an alias to /etc/aliases:
```
peter:    peterdemin
```
Make sure to update the postfix alias database with the new config:
```
sudo newaliases
```
Set domain name in /etc/mailname:
```
demin.dev
```
Start the server:
```
sudo systemctl start postfix
```

Verify the mail daemon listens on port 25:

$ sudo lsof -Pni:25
COMMAND  PID USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
master  4116 root   13u  IPv4  76561      0t0  TCP *:25 (LISTEN)
master  4116 root   14u  IPv6  76562      0t0  TCP *:25 (LISTEN)

Open ports in Firewall settings¶

TCP port: 25
IP range: 0.0.0.0/0

Email infrastructure uses other ports as well, but we don’t need them: IMAP: 143, 993, SMTP for sending emails from this server: 465, 587.

Add DNS record¶

Consider you want to have an email address: peter@demin.dev. And the IP address of the machine running the mail agent is 35.237.50.91.

MX record:
- Host name: demin.dev
- Type: MX
- TTL: 1 hour
- Data: 10 mail.demin.dev.
Mail server A record:
- Host name: mail.demin.dev
- Type: A
- TTL: 1 hour
- Data: 35.237.50.91

Check emails¶

All incoming emails are appended to this file:

less /var/spool/mail/${USER}

To have a better terminal experience reading incoming emails, install and run mutt:

sudo apt install -y mutt w3m

Configure mutt to use w3m for rendering HTML in ~/.muttrc:

auto_view text/html
alternative_order text/plain text/html

Sometimes inbound emails don’t have a plain-text representation, and HTML comes in quoted-printable encoding so that long lines are broken with extra equal signs prepended for continuation. This makes it hard to click on links.

The w3m renderer hides the links altogether, so it’s not helpful either. The solution is to save the email as a file and read it with less:

Inside mutt:

press v to list attachments.
press Enter to open the HTML (usually it’s the first one).
press s and save the HTML as mail.html.
exit mutt (q).
view decoded file with less mail.html.

Disable the mail server when you don’t need it¶

Just disable the firewall rule, and you can keep everything else intact.

The content¶

I don’t mean to pirate it, but since I had to go to such a great lengths to get them, here are the books I downloaded using my custom domain email address: