Sam's Insane Ravings

I finally decided it'd be nice to get an email when my crappy RAID in the closet throws a disk, instead of just hoping I "cat /proc/mdstat" sometime before a second disk goes and takes all the data with it. Plus it'd be nice to get an email when the "rsync data to remote server" poor man's backup fails for whatever reason.

So I installed exim on the underpowered little box in the closet. That was fun, at first I thought I'd just set local account on that machine to forward to one of my real email addresses, but exim just claimed "R=nonlocal: Mailing to remote domains not supported" when I tried sending such an email.

Some googling indicated that that's a debian thing, so README.Debian.gz was examined. So I set it up as a internet mail server that could send and receive mail.

That got me to error messages of the form: T=remote_smtp: SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data: host ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.com [209.85.133.114]: 550-5.7.1 [MY.EASILY.FOUND.IP] The IP you're using to send email is not authorized\n550-5.7.1 to send email directly to our servers. Please use\n550 5.7.1 the SMTP relay at your service provider instead.

I work from home and losing internet for a little while is hence something I try to avoid, I have both cable and DSL - and a silly little router thing that splits the traffic over both of them. Somehow I don't think time warner cable is going to accept mail at their relay if the router decides to send that traffic via the verizon DSL connection. Of course I could bind port 25 to the cable line - but then the mail won't work when that goes down for whatever reason. Plus my 30 second search of the website found nothing about what server to use and so on.

This website runs on a VPS thing which used to do the mail, until I offloaded that on google since keeping a working spam filter was too much bother. So I set it up as a relay (with AUTH of course...).

For reasons I don't fathom Anna doesn't like the gmail interface so when she uses webmail she uses the old webmail on the old mailserver. I set her gmail account to forward a copy of every email to the old server so that still works - I also do that because that's where her blackberry retrieves them from. Getting it to talk to gmail was beyond me.

So now there's a great case when sending an email from the little box in the closet to Anna. The mail is first queued on the little box and then sent to the VPS mail server. That server then forwards it to gmail. Gmail then forwards a copy of it back to the VPS mail server (there's no loop here since it uses a subdomain email). Then it is retrieved by the blackberry mail infrastructure from the VPS and beamed to Anna's blackberry - which is probably 5 metres from the original little box in the closet.