[Techtalk] relaying my own mail through my own server

[Rasjid Wilcox]

On Sunday 01 February 2004 06:54, Emma Jane Hogbin wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm trying to figure out exactly what kind of work would be needed to
> allow myself to relay mail through my new server. Right now I'm
> portforwarding through another server using:
> 	ssh -L 8025:localhost:25 mail.domain.com
> and a minor fix locally to postfix to relay mail through
> 	relayhost=[127.0.0.1]:25
>
> The server is running Debian stable with postfix and SSH. I've tried
> looking through a number of other documents, but I'm just getting turned
> around. Out of the following, is there any one specific set up that is
> recommended?
>
> 	https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/attachment.cgi?id=94312
> 	http://buffy.riseup.net/software/postfix.txt
> 	http://www.metaconsultancy.com/whitepapers/smtp.htm#s6
> 	http://www.trilug.org/~jeremy/mail-notes.txt
>
> I think it's the concept of authentication that I'm getting confused by.
> If I'm SSHing into the box to do port forwarding (as above), what kind of
> authentication am I doing?

Unless you have explicitly set something else up, you are most likely doing IP 
based authentication.  Most likely (hopefully!) your mail server has been set 
up to only relay from a local connection, or perhaps you local network.  When 
using ssh with port fowarding, to the mail server it appears that the 
connection is coming from the local machine (more generally - from the 
machine that you sshed into), and no user-level authentication is required.

It sounds like you are after authenticated SMTP.  Based on my quick read, I 
thought that the metaconsultancy link looked like the clearest.  But if this 
is a small setup, you probably don't want to use LDAP for the authentication.  
You can just setup saslauthd to just authenticate against the shadow password 
file.  

Hope this helps.

Rasjid.

-- 
Rasjid Wilcox
Canberra, Australia (UTC +11 hrs)
http://www.openminddev.net