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MAIL SERVER

Why run my own mailserver?

Running your own mail server can have many advantages. Having full control over an email system allows you to consolidate email accounts in one location; archive email messages for future reference and provide a reliable back-up for all email messages. More advanced features include sorting into specific folders, filtering for spam, removing viruses, and much more.

Why not have your own email server, if you have employees that you would like to assign an email address to e.g. joebloggs@yourcompany.com and janebloggs@yourcompany.com also it can help you with reliability when sending and receiving emails not relying on a third party.

Do I need a domain name?

Not really. A domain lets you send and receive email from someplace more unique than gmail.com or yahoo.com, plus allowing you to do fun things like host a website, but you can still run a useful mailserver without one. It's easy to set up tools like fetchmail and getmail. to retrieve your mail from outside email accounts, and deliver them to your mail server. This lets you check a long list of email addresses with a single email account, while giving you more flexible filtering, and a local copy of all of your email.

Without a Domain name, you can use a service such as DynDNS which will setup a dynamic domain for you such as luser@luser.dyndns.org. Then, the domain luser.dyndns.org will resolve back to your IP. There are even programs such as ddclient that can easily be configured to update the DNS records so if your IP changes often, like with dial-up, or some broadband providers, the luser.dyndns.org info will change with you. I wouldn't recommend delivering mail to a server behind dial-up, but such a server would still work great with fetchmail.

If you don't have a domain of your own but do have a static IP address, you can use just your IP in your email address (cheapskate@1.2.3.4). While this works in most cases it should be noted that some more restrictive email servers deny access to host without a FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name)