Old Mail Setup

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A few years ago i settled on using the Mercury mail server. I found it very powerful and lightweight with a small footprint that was ideally suited for me using it to poll my mail from various mailboxes scattered over the net. So once I got broadband to replace my dialup connection I was able to leave it on to poll every 5 minutes or so and it was again ideally suited to this purpose.

However earlier this year (2006) I got my broadband package upgraded complete with fixed IP address so I registered a domain name and lo and behold this site was born. Once again I decided to use Mercury as my mail server and it is quite simply brilliant and pretty much simply simple. It has some nice built-in anti spam features and suits my needs perfectly. Or at least it did until I decided to start playing about.

Recently at work we upgraded our Lotus Domino servers so naturally I decided to install Domino on one of my machines here at home. I figured I would use it as the server for my primary mail account and as such I configured it to pass all mail for addresses not in the Domino address book to the Mercury server. This as expected works brilliantly except now I had to figure out some way of filtering spam from reaching my personal mail account.

So I decided to install a mail gateway!

This was actually much simpler that it sounds since thanks to VMware. There are quite a few rather excellent virtual appliances out there to perform this task. The one I settled on was SpamVigilante which is based on FreeBSD. It is a doddle to setup and also performs virus scanning using Amavis and ClamAV and also of course spam filtering using the venerable SpamAssassin. With this installed and up and running I reconfigured my router so that all mail now goes to this machine and it routes it accordingly.

So the routing... this is where it gets complicated. Incoming mail gets delivered as follows:

mailfilter.sweetnam.eu - recieves the mail and passes it on to:
notes.sweetnam.eu - which is my Domino server and only handles one address! If the recipient is not there it then passes mail to:
nancy.sweetnam.eu - which is my Mercury server and the final destination for most mail.

Outgoing mail goes as follows:
MUA passes it to nancy.sweetnam.eu which in turn passes it on to mailfilter.sweetnam.eu which delivers it to the destination server. Unless I'm sending mail from my Domino account in which case notes.sweetnam.eu relays the mail on to mailfilter.eu and then to the destination server.

And of course there is one more complication. Any mail generated by the Wiki or the blog will relay from www.sweetnam.eu to notes.sweetnam.eu which then will pass it on to mercury.sweetnam.eu which will in turn pass it on to mailfilter.sweetnam.eu and ultimately to its destination. The reason for this complicated route from the web server is that one of the recipients is on the Domino server and another is on the Mercury server.

I never liked things too easy!

So in total there are the following MTA's operating on my home LAN all serving just little old me:

mailfilter.sweetnam.eu - Postfix running on FreeBSD
nancy.sweetnam.eu - Mercury running on Windows 2000
notes.sweetnam.eu - Lotus Domino running on Windows 2003
sidv2.sweetnam.eu - Lotus Domino running on Linux
www.sweetnam.eu - Postfix running on Linux.