[ILUG] Setting up a mail server

[Colm Buckley]

On 20 Apr 2006, at 14:30, Timothy Murphy wrote:

> I've purchased a domain "gayleard.com" (from euroDNS)
> and am wondering if it is possible for mail sent to say  
> "tim at gayeard.com"
> to be delivered to my computer?
>
> I tried sending a test message, but I see from /var/log/maillog
> that the mailing failed with the message:
>
> Name server: mail.eircom.net.gayleard.com.: host not found
>
> Eircom is my broadband supplier,
> and outgoing email goes via mail.eircom.net .

Okay, there are a couple of different things going on here:

Firstly, there's a simply typo in the zone file for gayleard.com; the  
MX record which says "MX 10 mail.eircom.net" should have a trailing  
dot, as records without a trailing dot are deemed to be relative to  
the current zone (or current suffix) so "mail.eircom.net" will be  
interpreted as "mail.eircom.net.gayleard.com".

However, simply fixing that won't be sufficient, as it's unlikely  
that eircom's mail exchanger will accept mail for gayleard.com unless  
you've come to some arrangement with them.

To accept mail for gayleard.com, you need to:

	* Have a host on the internet which is reliably reachable using a  
particular host name
	* Have that host as the lowest MX record for gayleard.com
	* Set that host up to accept mail for the gayleard.com domain
	* Forward to other email addresses (or else deliver to local mailboxes)

A domain provider which has email forwarding would be the best bet.   
It seems that EuroDNS can actually do this, but they will forward all  
mail to all addresses in the gayleard.com domain to a single other IP  
address.  If this is acceptable to you, you should set the MX records  
for the domain to whatever EuroDNS recommend, and perform whatever  
other configuration at their end is necessary to forward mails from  
*@gayleard.com to whatever destination you require.

	Colm

-- 
Colm Buckley / colm at tuatha.org / +353 87 2469146 / www.colm.buckley.name