EMAIL SERVER SETUP

[sprangler99]

I'm new to all this, i want to set up an Internal Email Server
here is my situation, My Website is currently hosted, by a host in a foreign country, i access it with this interface called Plesk, i can create email accounts, aliases, add fils etc. I get my Internet from a Local isp, I have 3 static IP addresses of which one is used for Internet connectivity, (using NAT), i've been trying to set up an internal email server, since 95% of our emails will be on the same domain. However the MX records and DNS are confusing me, does the PC that i am running the email server on need to have a public IP, Please I need some help with this

 

[cajuntank]

Once you have your email server up and ready to go, on your firewall, you will create a NAT to one of you static IP addresses and then open up port 25(SMTP) to that server, and if your using Merak (I'm assuming you are since that's where you posted to), you would also open port 32000 (I think that's the default port) for Web-Mail access. If you plan on using POP3 or IMAP externally, you'll have to open those ports on your firewall as well. You can test this works by telnetting from the Internet to that public IP address to that port, ie... telnet 72.x.x.x 25 to see if you get a 220 mail server name ESMTP IceWarp bla bla bla.

Once that works, you will create a host record with whomever is hosting your DNS records (not nessesarily your ISP, you can find that out by doing a whois at a domain name registrar). This will be something like mail.domain.com = 72.x.x.x (or whatever the static IP address you chose is), then you'll create a mx record that will = the new host name you just created. This will get mail directed into you server through you firewall. This usually takes between 24-48 hours to fully propagate across the entire Internet, so exspect some mail delays when you do this (I like to do this stuff on the weekend). You will also need to get with you ISP (this time, it will be your ISP) to create another record called a PRT record. This is the record that resolves IP address to name instead of name to IP. A lot of mail servers of SPAM detectors do a reverse lookup to make sure the server that sends the mail to them can be reversed back to that exact name. So your ISP will need to change the IP address name of what they have, which is normally something like 12-244-54-72.adsl.isp.net to
match your name record (ie...mail.domain.com)

Hope that helps.