Sunday, May 15. 2005

As funny as it might seem, with all the traveling I do I haven't ever gotten around to setting up my own SMTP relay for sending mail. In general I've always "gotten by" using a rather poor formula: If it's not that important, just wait until you get home. If you need to send mail, ssh to your server and send it from there. I just didn't have the time or energy to wade my way through the monster that is sendmail to get what seems like an incredibly simple task (just a simple auth over SSL to allow me to relay mail). Unfortunately, with my recent change in jobs to Zend it became incredibly important that I be able to send and receive mail reliably so I've put a considerable amount of effort in the last few days to getting myself into the 21st century on my mail. I replaced the horrible c-client imap server with dovecot (thanks to Wez for putting me on the fast track with its configuration), and thanks to this excellent guide I was able to cut through all of the fud on sendmail. If you're looking to setup your own relay I highly recommend this little gem to do it.

Now, if I could only get my Treo, laptop, desktop and our internal Intranet's contact lists and calenders synchronized automatically.