At University, I studied Music and English, Architecture Design, and Computing Science.
I developed a CAAD graphics system for an architectural firm in the 1980’s.
Moving into computers, IT took me to Sydney where I did everything “IT” – modems, routers, soldering, printers, terminals, software, database, operating systems – covering many industry segments. Operating systems included DEC, HP, SCO, SUN, IBM, and some integrations with AS/400 and Mainframe.
I worked in IBM Australia and IBM & Global Services. I had access to developers and documentation in Boulder USA, and the On-Demand archival software used by many Banks.
From 2012 on, I helped friends and referrals with their websites, hosting on Amazon AWS, Akamai/Linode, or cPanel.
Email configurations are not included on this website
No configurations for Email
This site does not include email packages such as Axigen, Dovecot, iRedmail, Modoboa and so on, or web clients like Roundcube.
If you wish to explore building an email server, it could take several months and no good outcome. You would need to open ports required for email in a local region through an AWS out of sandbox request for your region, then open imap/s & smtp/d ports in a Security Group – e.g. port 53, 465,587, 143, 993, 25 then test on the DNS Checker website the ports are open.
Email servers use more memory than WordPress, so on a small EC2 instance you can easily use 400MB on swap space. The system would suffer badly on performance or freeze. One product contiually uses up a full 1GB swap space, and has constant errors logged in root mail about the packages not being suitable. It is incredibly hard to find good documentation on usage and problem solving, or to get help.
If you have to alter domain names and mail domains in /etc/hostname and /etc/hosts, an EC2 instance can be unusable. Again, no documentation or even forum help on several critical problems like this. The installation instructions are based on assumptions and have been for previous OS versions, hence do not work.
There is very little information on the various email system configurations. There may be syntax documents. It is grossly disappointing if you try to invest time and have no satisfaction with a good outcome.
As a big red flag, I would ask why one package uses self-signed SSL certificates from China.
The risks to your important emails are so high, from my experience, as to leave this pursuit. For instance, upgrade issues, mailbox folder failures, database corruption and how to fix, managing users, and so on. I have spent 4 years on these products.
The cost of an EC2 email server instance is minimally twice as much as any reputable service like MS Exchange.
My summary – Email is nasty and complicated beyond anything reasonable. There may be companies who wish to delve into all this, but they have money and an IT team. Email itself is a bad legacy yet still in use today. It needs a total rebuild, not based on the way mime content is constructed today.
As an example, some specialised companies try their best to add functionality. The problem is still how they can or cannot edit the email’s raw data. Sometimes this is ugly. Even when trying to detect hidden spam or phishing, they may claim to offer such features but not mention they can'[t do it for base64 content. Some features sound good, but in practice are highly limited due to the constructs of email itself.
These are my views.
