[CentOS] Setting up postfix under CentOS-6

natxo asenjo natxo.asenjo at gmail.com
Fri Sep 13 13:35:33 UTC 2013


On 09/13/2013 01:37 PM, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> natxo asenjo wrote:
>
>> Postfix's target audience is not the average joe user but e-mail
>> administrators. It is assumed you know some stuff about how smtp e-mail
>> works.
>
> I wonder if that is, or should be, any longer the case?
> I would have guessed that many, perhaps the majority, of CentOS users
> are now running home networks rather than commercial sites.
> I realise that RedHat may not be particularly interested in these people,
> but I would have thought CentOS should be.

this is certainly not my case. I do run centos (even in my laptop) but
my main use is professional. And frankly, I do not know anyone in my
personal environment with a linux computer (tablets/phones don't count).

>> Once you have that figured out, then you can go on to other configs,
>> like the content inspection, integration with other data sources,
>> performance problems, etc. It does make sense once you approach it with
>> an e-mail admin hat on.
>
> I'm not an "email admin" except by necessity.
> If in fact it takes say two days of reading to setup postfix
> then I would revert to sendmail,
> which has been working perfectly for me for years.
> (Incidentally, having now setup postfix/amavis/clamd/spamassassin
> it does not seem to me to have any advantages - at least in my case -
> over sendmail/procmail/spamassassin .
> I've been told it is much better, but nobody has told me why.)

maybe you should not have switched then. The main advantage of postfix
above sendmail is that it is now more common. Sendmail has this
reputation of being hard, so no one wants to start using it now. The
pool of sendmail admins is dwindling fast.

>> maybe you should be looking at commercial
>> offerings like barracuda. It is nothing to be ashamed of to buy stuff
>> that works and has support when something goes wrong. Handling e-mail
>> for a company without understanding how it works internally can be
>> stressing.
>
> As I have said, I am not a company.
> I think I run a fairly typical home network,
> a setup that I would guess is going to become steadily more popular
> as the number of devices on a local network in the average household grows:
> laptops, TVs, smart phones, printers, etc.

somehow I doubt that most families will start installing a centos server
to handle their e-mail. Everybody is happy to hand it off to gmail
nowadays, so they just configure that. As to the other devices, they
just need network connectivity, and the access points take care of that.

Most people I know are happy to get a NAS device to keep their stuff 
centrally
and for downloading stuff from newsgroups/bittorrent. They are not in
the least interested in a mail server. But maybe the people you know are
:-)

>> Also, the postfix mailing list is the best place to ask postfix questions
>
> I did ask the same two questions on that newsgroup/mailing-list
> and got no response.
> As you say, it seems to be the haunt of commercial or company email admins.

well, yes, those are the people using postfix after all :-)

I went to check what you posted there, and I can see the problem with
myhostname:

myhostname = alfred.gayleard.eu

but that host does not exist:

$ host alfred.gayleard.eu
Host alfred.gayleard.eu not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

This means it does not exist in dns. My guess is it does not exist in
your hosts file either.

-- 
groet,
natxo




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