1 Topic by palumbo.software

  • palumbo.software
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Topic: FQDN will just the regular domain name do?

I've never set up a mail server before, but I am hosting a web server for many many years now on debian. I've always wanted to set up my own mail server, but always thought it couldn't be done on a dynamic IP address until I actually researched it the other day.

I'm confused on what my mx should be. I am going to be hosting this from a home server. Just a server I have had for many years running apache, mysql, PHP, etc. I don't have another server to host a mail server so everything will be on the same domain. I keep seeing examples on website using mail.example.com as a MX record. Since my mail server will be on the same exact server as everything else do I set my MX record to just example.com? Same for my hostname and host in Linux /etc/host /etc/hostname?

I've been using DNSExit for many years now for my dynamic dns needs. Probably the best free one I have run across. I know I need to set up my MX records and A record before I can even do any of this. I'm just confused on what I suppose to do. I know most people run a mail server on its own, so I would imagine that's where the mail.exmaple.com subdomain is coming from.

A little information on this would be greatly appreciated, sorry for all the noob questions.

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Spider Email Archiver: On-Premises, lightweight email archiving software developed by iRedMail team. Supports Amazon S3 compatible storage and custom branding.

2 Reply by ZhangHuangbin

  • ZhangHuangbin
  • ZhangHuangbin
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Re: FQDN will just the regular domain name do?

Some important notes:

*) It's a BAD idea to run mail service with a DYNAMIC IP address. Too many spammers send spam with dynamic IP addresses, so most ISP block emails sent from dynamic IP addresses.

*) As mentioned in iRedMail installation guide:

WARNING: iRedMail is designed to be deployed on a FRESH server system, which means your server does NOT have mail related components installed, e.g. MySQL, OpenLDAP, Postfix, Dovecot, Amavisd, etc (iRedMail will install and configure them for you automatically). Otherwise it may override your existing files/configurations althought it will backup files before modifing, and it may be not working as expected.

So, don't install iRedMail on your existing server, it will mess it up.

3 Reply by palumbo.software

  • palumbo.software
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Re: FQDN will just the regular domain name do?

ZhangHuangbin wrote:

Some important notes:

*) It's a BAD idea to run mail service with a DYNAMIC IP address. Too many spammers send spam with dynamic IP addresses, so most ISP block emails sent from dynamic IP addresses.

*) As mentioned in iRedMail installation guide:

WARNING: iRedMail is designed to be deployed on a FRESH server system, which means your server does NOT have mail related components installed, e.g. MySQL, OpenLDAP, Postfix, Dovecot, Amavisd, etc (iRedMail will install and configure them for you automatically). Otherwise it may override your existing files/configurations althought it will backup files before modifing, and it may be not working as expected.

So, don't install iRedMail on your existing server, it will mess it up.

Telling me not to install it on an existing system doesn't answer a single question I had. I appreciate you warning me that it could mess my system up, but that still doesn't answer anything I asked.

4 Reply by ZhangHuangbin

  • ZhangHuangbin
  • ZhangHuangbin
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Re: FQDN will just the regular domain name do?

MX should point to the hostname which you have mail service running, not an IP address.
For example, your mail server has hostname "abc.domain.com", and it's resolvable in DNS (point to an valid IP address), then your MX record should be 'abc.domain.com'.