000 Introduction

I am writting this post in order to document the initial setup that I performed in the production environment where this site is hosted. The purpose that I had in mind when I decided to setup the whole environment from scratch was just learning, as well as seing by first hand what the other side looks like. I have no knowledge at all on system administration, or network security. I did some research in order to find good documentation. In my opinion, as well as those that I have read in different forums the ISPmail tutorials series is one of the most reliable and complete collection of documents on mailserver setup, that you can find on the internet —and it also includes some tips and recommendation on mailserver administration and maintenance—.

It is not difficult to find other tutorials on the internet that adapt the ISPmail guide to other type of environments, as this tutorial for DigitalOcean droplets running Ubuntu.

Linode has a great collection of guides and tutorials, very well designed and complete. This guide was very helpfull, but I used it as a supporting guide for the ISPmail one, because it amplifies some concepts and explains a bit more in deep some information in a way that for someone with a lower level of experience like me, results easier to understand. At some point, it’s important to notice that these two guides differ in the steps taken to approach the configuration of the mailserver. In my case I must say that the approach that worked out first was the one recommended in the ISPmail guide, so I did not experiment further with the configuration explained in the Linode guide.

Anyway, no matter how well you prepare and do your research before you start the type of setup a mailserver requires, there are many chances that you will have to take your time untill all the pieces work togheter.

Pataphysics will be, above all, the science of the particular, despite the common opinion that the only science is that of the general. Pataphysics will examine the laws governing exceptions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this one.

In the following sections of this document I will just go through the steps as they were performed in my system, mostly as a precautionary measure that will serve as a record, in case of future problems. In addition, I will provide some step by step instructions of some aspects that I found a bit vaguely described.

Suppose someone to assert: The gostak distims the doshes. You do not know what this means; nor do I. But if we assume that it is English, we know that the doshes are distimmed by the gostak. We know too that one distimmer of doshes is a gostak. If, moreover, the doshes are galloons, we know that some galloons are distimmed by the gostak. And so we may go on, and so we often do go on.