HOW TO SETUP YOUR OWN MAIL SERVER WITH ANTI-SPAM CONFIGURATION IN 60 MINUTES

Introduction

This tutorial will teach you how to set up your own robust email server. We are focusing on a small personal server with up to a few email accounts. After following this guide, you will have a fully functional mail server and you can connect with your favourite client to access, read and send emails. The Anti-Spam configuration will drop unwanted messages.

This tutorial will use yourdomain.com as domain name and mail.yourdomain.com as hostname for our mail server. The desired email address will be yourname@yourdomain.com. We assume that our server has the IP address 1.2.3.4.

Software and technologies used

• Postfix v2.9.6 as SMTP server
• Dovecot v2.0.19 as IMAP server
• We will use Unix user accounts and tunnel the SASL authentication through TLS
• Postgrey v1.34 – to reject spam from the beginning
  (more about postgrey)
• SPF (Sender Policy Framework) validating to reduce spam
  (more aboutSPF)
• SPF and DMARC DNS entry to prevent spoofing
• DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) to sign our email messages
  (moreabout DKIM)

THE TRUTH ABOUT – HOW TO SECURELY ERASE A SOLID STATE DRIVE (SSD)

The short answer is:

Perhaps you can’t. Well, you can, but that means that you need to use a hammer.

The long answer:

You could use the build in ATA Secure Erase command (if your drive supports that), or you can overwrite the SSD multiple times, but…

Bullet Proof Data Encryption with LUKS and a detached Header

LUKS is a good choice when it comes to encryption. It’s an extension for plain dm-crypt and has a couple of advantages to give extra security and features.

How does a drive look like after being entirely encrypted with LUKS?
The first part of the drive contains the LUKS header (a few MB’s) with 8 keyslots, followed by the data area. The header is not secret, so not encrypted. The rest of the drive will look like random data.

What’s in the header and what does ‘detached’ mean?

How to convince Hotmail to deliver your messages to the receipts mailbox

You’ve set up your own mail server and all runs like a charm. Well, you may find out that your messages are not delivered to any Hotmail account. Yes I know, your log shows that the massage has been accepted by the Hotmail server, but has it been delivered? Even to the junk folder? Try it out and if it hasn’t, read on!

So let’s name and then face the enemy!

The enemy is called “Microsoft SmartScreen”. We will find out later that the word smart is not appropriate.

First of all let’s make sure that your server is sending the message successfully. Create a Hotmail test account if not already done. Send a test email from your server to the Hotmail address and check the syslog.

  cat  /var/log/syslog | grep hotmail.com