[commercial] sendmail setup request

[Steve O'Hara-Smith]

On Mon, 09 Jul 2018 06:32:50 +0000
Mayuresh Kathe <mayuresh at kathe.in> wrote:

> my needs are indeed limited to what i have described, on reading it, you
> would notice that i do not wish to have my mails be stored locally.
> i want to have the mails on a server instance so that i can access them
> from a machine other than mine via ssh.

	This is somewhat at odds with wanting to use mailx to read your
mail because mailx can only handle mail that is local to the machine
running mailx, it reads and writes files rather than talking to a service,
it does talk to a local sendmail instance to send mail though.

	What you could do is get a BSD VPS and use fetchmail on that to
collect your mail from kathe.in and do a minimal outgoing only
configuration of sendmail to use the kathe.in SMTP server as a smarthost
for which you should find plenty of tutorial material.

	Then you can access your mail by logging into your VPS and *only*
by logging in to your VPS, miss a payment and your mail is gone forever. The
disadvantage of non-local storage is that you don't own that storage.
Setting up a cron job at home to rsync your VPS home directory to your own
machine would be a very good thing to do if you go this way.

	An alternative is to use fetchmail on your local machine and rsync
your mail to the VPS for reading, that way you own the master copy.

	What I would do (and do) is keep my mail locally (I run an imap
server but fetchmail works too) and set up a VPN so that I could access my
own network remotely[1]. There are a good many tutorials on setting up
openvpn to provide a VPN service. Alternatively just expose a listening ssh
socket to the world (disable login by password in ssh if you do that) which
is what I did before I got round to setting up openvpn.

[1] This assumes that you have an always-on system, decent network
connectivity, a public IP address (or an IPV6 tunnel) and control over your
firewall.

-- 
Steve O'Hara-Smith <steve at sohara.org>