E-mail

I have added a contact e-mail to the About page! Feel free to write to me if you’ve got feedback or just want to say hi! I might take some time to respond and the response might end up in your junk mail folder, let’s see how it goes :).

To do that I set up Exim and Dovecot onto this server. Probably not one of the best mail server practices, but I think it’ll be fine for a single-user mail server.

Setting them up was fairly simple, but I had a hard time finding a guide that would walk me through the basics of running a single-user mail server. A lot of guides seem to be for rather complicated setups, and frankly, went a bit over my head. It didn’t help me that it was my first time dealing with mail delivery systems.

I did find some with-keys mail server setup tools (ex. Mail-in-a-Box and friends), but these either wanted a fresh server just for mail server usage, or Docker. Docker is pretty much out of the question on this server due to the low available disk space, and I don’t want to have to rent another server just for to run a (potentially unused) mail server.

I thought about making a guide myself, but I’m not that sure that my configuration in secure and I don’t want to propagate (potentially) bad configurations. It isn’t running in open relay mode (pre-configured not to, at least in the CentOS repos) and can receive and send mail, but there’s exactly eleven million configuration options, most of which I didn’t learn.

That went a lot smoother than I anticipated spits over left shoulder.

Even if no one writes then, hey, at least I can crank out e-mail addresses for web site registrations, since, on the modern web, everyone and their grandma wants to claw your e-mail address from you for their newsletter ;).

Should finish the modem series some day…