Mail in a Box worked perfectly -- One Question

Hey… So I needed a new domain / email rather quickly due to boring reasons I won’t go into… Anyway, I decided to try mail in a box last night, hoping I’d be able to get it set up by the end of today.

The process was so easy, in fact, that by the time I went to bed 45 mins later the email server was working . The whole process took about 45 mins on an extra domain I had. Most of the time was just waiting for automatic stuff to install.

I already used Namecheap for DNS, and I already had some Digital Ocean Droplets … The process pretty much involved the Digital Ocean tutorial , and everything worked.

My only question is this: Can I use the mailinabox DNS config to set the domain @ record to an A record?

Thanks, this software is awesome.

Thanks!

Yes. @ isn’t really a record, it’s just shorthand for the domain itself. In the Mail-in-a-Box control panel, you just leave the subdomain field blank.

K I guess I’m just used to typing @ in namecheap heh. Awesome. Thanks. . .

Next up I’m gonna test the calendar stuff with my phone.

Oh the other thing (in case anyone’s interested), is I tested disabling the greylist since I saw alot of posts about it. You can disable it by putting a “return ‘DUNNO’;” statement on line 337 of /usr/sbin/postgrey … Like in this example

But I ended up just reducing the greylist TTL from 300 seconds to 180 seconds instead; seems like a less hack-y solution.

The TTL was reduced in version v0.10 which you probably got in just a little ahead of:

And the next version will let lots of reputable mail go through without any greylisting.

Ok thanks. Another note for anyone interesting in setting up Mail in a box… The ownCloud / Android integration is awesome, I even got it working with tasks and email… It’s pretty easy if you have linux at home … The mailinabox interface is slick…

(1) The mobile integration is AWESOME.

(2) I’ve got the setup (Mailinabox with owncloud) working with my Android and it syncs my calendar, contacts, tasks, and mail. I have it working over Imap using K9 mail. More on how I got Tasks in a minute…

(3) Creating the SSL cert was really ezmode … You don’t even need to log into the machine over ssh. Just cut and paste the cert into the web interface. It worked fine for me with RapidSSL certs from namecheap.

(4) In terms of how I got the Tasks app; basically since mailinabox has a full recent version of ownCloud … First make sure Mail, Calendar, and Contacts are working with your phone , just follow the instructions… I installed Tasks app from the app store on my phone… Then I enabled ownCloud admin mode (linked in another thread – do so at your own risk says the script ) …

(5) Once I got the ownCloud admin mode, and I had Tasks on my phone… I installed Tasks onto ownCloud on the server… You run git clone https://github.com/owncloud/tasks/ from /usr/local/lib/owncloud/apps as www-data … Then log into the ownCloud web interface and enable the Tasks app … And that’s more or less it, Tasks will sync with your phone if you have the app setup properly.

https://apps.owncloud.com/content/show.php/Tasks+Enhanced?content=164356

Overall , this is a really cool setup… It’s basically all the features of Gmail and Google Apps without having to give away privacy. . . Next thing I will probably set up dm-crypt on my owncloud server for /home , /var, and /usr , with Dropbear and an InitramFS that fetches the crypto keyfile at server startup from a trusted remote machine… Then all the data will be protected on-disk without ever having to enter a passphrase.

I have to encourage you not to modify the box in ways that it specifically tells you are at your own risk. Then next time you update Mail-in-a-Box, anything could happen to your changes (and possibly your data).

Hey no worries… I take incremental snapshots of all my VMs with attic. So I can restore to any point in time.
https://attic-backup.org/

I get that there’s a risk of a cascading failure on an update, but I’m okay with the risk /reward tradeoff. Thanks for the heads up – I’ll keep an eye on the machine’s stability over the next couple of months.