Residential Mail Server Hosting for Fun & Profit
Long, Long ago, I ran a mail server for myself and others. I even earned a small profit. This server ran on a Sun SparcStation using standard unix tools, which sat in my house plugged into a UPS just in case the power went out. I had a commercial DSL connection which was slow by today's standards - but the router never needed to be rebooted, and I had several static IP addresses. The setup was simple: 1. Purchase a comain 2. Set up DNS with an MX record which pointed to your mail server At this point, I could already send and receive emails from the server. To allow people who didn't love using PINE over SSH to use it, you just had to run IMAPd and such to allow them to connect via Eudora, Outlook, Thunderbird, or whatever client they wanted to use. When web mail became popular, I even set up Roundcube Mail. Despite the average penetration and speed of the Internet increasing, this setup be...
