Idea how to set up e-mail on my home server? Right now I have My Godaddy domain pointing to my IP and my site is hosted on my home computer. I was wondering if anyone could tell me what I should configure at Godaddy and what files to configure with Apache (installed via XAMPP with MySQL and PHP) and what to put in those files. My domain is 347media.com and I would like to use mail.347media as my pop3. I already have port 25 and 110 opened and forwarded and my FireWall is not blocking them. I'm VERY new to this so please be very gentle and informative. Thank you in advance.
XAMPP is a webserver (usually used for local testing), you need an email server installed like exim to receive emails. The best way to do it is buy some webhosting and point your domain over to it, that way you can set any email accounts you need up. Then connect to them using an email client such as outlook. Look for some cpanel hosting, that sould make it simple to use & setup. If your looking to receive emails directly to your "server" then you need to set it up as a server and if your new to this I wouldn't recomend it. But if you want to play then try installing either a windows server os like sbs or a linux disto like centos. Both of these can be configured as webservers & email servers. Ash
The advice I would give depends a bit on what your purpose is. If you want to start a website and receive email using the same domain then I would recommend paying for someone else to do it. You can find quite cheap solutions for all of these services. The money you pay for someone else to do it will be made up in the reliability of the service and the ease of changing things. Remember: your time is worth money too. If you want to learn how to administer web and email servers then I would recommend getting a small, cheap machine (my first was a 100MHz pentium that I was given for free) and install Linux on it from scratch. Don't use your normal desktop machine; it will be off/rebooting/unusable too often to function as a mail or web server. Once you have Linux installed, use a package manager (apt-get or yum most commonly) to install Apache, Postfix and Cyrus. Later, once you are comfortable with those, remove them and install Lighttpd and Exim. Feel free to change the order you try these out in and also feel free to choose completely different web and email software. Whatever you do, don't pick qmail first. It's too scary for a first-time mail administrator
sending mail from a home server ( localhost ) will most likely end up in oyur mail getting caught in spam filters ... it is impossible to have a clean mail server record from a localhost unless you have a permanent IP from your ISP and setup a strict SPF record definiing your home-IP as sole smtp-server for all your mail! keep that in mind when sending mail from home rather than from a www-based smtp server. in modern times wil xiollions of spam mail sent across the planet spam filters more and more look at origin of smtp and clean domain name vs IP resolving and much more to keep the mail-world clean.