qmail - relaying - with co-location hosting

[amit_shah25]

Hi all,

I have a question regarding email - relaying. I am totally new to MTA setup so please pardon my stupidities !!!!!

I have a small company, and have decided to go for a co-location hosting service, and I want to configure a mail server on this machine that will be at the co-location site.

And I want to be able to use this mail server to send mails within my domain, as well as to anyone else.

For example,

I am - ashah@mycompany.net

I want to be able to send email to --

someoneelse@mycompany.net, as well as
someone@someotherdomain.org -- where I donot host someotherdomain.org, and have nothing to do with it whatsoever.

I did some research, and decided to go with qmail (after reading qmail vs sendmail)... First of all please let me know if qmail is good for a total newbie admin.

Second - I read the "Life with qmail" article and some articles on relaying, but it seems that relaying should be turned off for security. And only selective relay should be allowed ... In short, qmail should either know where the email is coming from OR where it is going to. But if I am sitting at my home connecting to the internet thru my ISP (I can't control what IP I get from my ISP) and want to use the mail server of the co-location hosting, it seems there is no way unless I totally open relaying, OR do SMTP authentication. But I couldn't find anything on howto do SMTP authentication with qmail. The document just says that read relaying for more info ...

I am kindaa stuck and would really appreciate any kind of help.

I am open to any suggestions including reconsidering my choice of qmail too...

Please help !!!

[amit_shah25]

Hi again !!!

I was looking up on SMTP Authentication and found

http://www1.cuni.cz/~vhor/qmail/smtpauth-en.html

which shows how to configure SMTP authentication with qmail.

The only thing is if I set it up this way, I dont know if it is a secure setup, and this is the way any other experienced network admin would do it, or he would have another approach.

I couldn't find anything other than SMTP Authentication that could help my situation where I want to setup qmail on an third party hosted machine.

Please guide/help me !!


Cheers !!!

[mdwatts]

If your ISP requires SMTP Authentication as many of them do now (mine does), then by all means configure qmail to use SMTP Auth.

SMTP Authentication requires that you authenticate yourself to the ISP's smtp servers before you are allowed to retrieve email. More secure this way.

[amit_shah25]

But I dont want to use my ISP's Mail Server at all. I want to have my own mailserver. The only thing is the mailserver is not on my intranet (because I dont have one !!! We work from home) So we all want to use that mailserver from our home and we connect to that mailserver over the internet and not thru intranet. So the ISP's SMTP doesnot really matter to me.

I dont know if you misunderstood my problem, or I am doing something absolutely stupid.

I am a total newbie to Linux admin so please beer with me !!!