1) Some ISPs won’t let you run a server at home, or want to charge you a lot of money to do so (Insight performs regular port scans and will cut off your service if they find anything)

2) If your residential Internet service goes down temporarily, RFC compliant remote servers will keep trying to deliver mail for 4-5 days as the article says, but many of them will issue a notification to the sender after the FIRST failed delivery attempt that delivery is being delayed, which can look unprofessional if you’re using this for work (a professor at business school gave me a lecture about this when he got one of these notifications trying to e-mail me something)

3) The encryption method they use (EncFS) leaks metadata about the files it’s storing; full disk encryption is always more secure

cd /etc/opendkim
chown root:opendkim mail
chmod g+r mail


Also, “chmod go-rwx /etc/opendkim/” doesn’t work, as you’ve noticed if you’ve tried it. Leave off the trailing “/“.

Great how-to! It’s really helping me patch up the ol’ mail server.

The log shows me:
Dec 9 09:47:18 ip-172-XXX-XXX-XXX dovecot: auth-worker: mysql(127.0.0.1): Connected to database mailserver
Dec 9 09:47:18 ip-172-XXX-XXX-XXX dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=me@XXX.XXX, method=PLAIN, rip=189.XXX.XXX.XXX, lip=172.XXX.XXX.XXX, mpid=7171, TLS
Dec 9 09:47:19 ip-172-31-40-52 dovecot: imap(me@XXX.XXX): Connection closed bytes=13/344

But I have no answer to my SMTP request.

I’m using the same server used in IMAP, so:

IMAP (this is working fine!):
Username: me@XXX.XXX
Incomeserver: mail.XXX.XXX
Port: 993 (already open in my firewall)
Connection type: SSL

SMTP (this is NOT working):
Sending server: mail.XXX.XXX
Port: 587 (already open in my firewall)
Connection: Start TLS
Username: me@XXX.XXXX
Password: XXX
Connection type: PLAIN

Actually I’ve tried all combinations in SMTP settings:
None + Plain
None + Login
None + CRAM-MD5
None + DIGEST-MD5

Start TLS + Plain
Start TLS + Login
Start TLS + CRAM-MD5
Start TLS + DIGEST-MD5

SSL + Plain
SSL + Login
SSL + CRAM-MD5
SSL + DIGEST-MD5

None of these settings allowed me to connect to my SMTP server.

I’m using 2244 as SSH port. Could be something related?

The mail client I’m using is AirMail (Mac).

Could you please send some words about it?

Thanks in advanced,

Well the e-mail database is encrypted with encfs, so if the host/harddisk is given to authorities they can not decrypt it and thus can not access your e-mails.

However, in general it’s true that if someone ‘evil’ has physical access to your host, you’re usually screwed. Because one can obtain the encryption keys from memory as long as the server is running.

But, obviously that does not mean you shouldn’t make it ‘as difficult as you can’ to protect your privacy!

Nice to see that someone got to work z-push-contrib + dovecot + solr