I’m doing some fairly extensive email configuration work. I’m hoping that I won’t break anything in the process but as the email config is pretty complicated I can’t guarantee that you won’t stop receiving email notifications at some point!
Background: After out-sourcing my email delivery for a while I’ve come to realise the limitations of free out-sourcing. I’ve got plenty of servers and none seem to be on any blacklists so I’m going to in-source delivery again.
Hopefully nobody has been cut off from email notifications. I’m making reasonable progress and have migrated four of my personal domains across to my own mail server. I’m learning with each one and also speeding up the re-configuration each time.
The most complicated domains are the ones related to the forum so they will be last and hopefully I’ll have learned all the tricks by then!
Grrrrr…I’ve hit a roadblock, or actually a mail-block.
I’m implementing a ‘one package does all’ mail server. I looked around before deciding what to use and there were a few options, e.g. MailCow and Mail-in-a-Box that appear to work well and have been around for years. However, there was also a newer solution called Stalwart-Mail which was getting lots of great reviews. It seemed to do all that the others did, but with less server resources (memory and CPU) needed.
I decided to use Stalwart-Mail and all went well at first. As suggested it was easy to set up, gave me the info I needed to setup DNS (MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC records) and after figuring things out with the first domain I breezed through setting up another 5-6 domains.
I struggled with the next one which was mail from a subdomain which needed to be sent by a main domain address. That ended up not being a Stalwart problem - I’d made a mistake in the DNS settings.
Then I came to the mail-block. A second sub-domain that also sent mail using main-domain addresses. I thought that my experience with the previous subdomain would let me do this easily, but I came completely unstuck. DNS is set the same as the first subdomain, but when the subdomain account logs into the mail server there’s an ‘authentication failure’. Unfortunately even with logging turned up to DEBUG that’s all I get. It might be useful to know more about the error, e.g. is if the username or password that’s wrong, or does the password appear to be in the wrong format, etc. I know the login and password details are correct in both the sending software and the mail server - I’ve checked them multiple time and changed them too just to be sure there wasn’t a typo. Beyond that I’ve no idea why it’s not working.
So, I’ve reached the end of this branch of the road. There are no more diagnostics because the detailed workings are hidden behind the nice simple GUI, and indeed they might not even exist behind the GUI.
I’m now going back to one of the other longer standing solutions which put a nice GIU in front of standard mail packages. If there’s a problem I can dig deeper into the packages themselves. Of course, it uses more server resources because it’s individual packages in a wrapper, but I think I have plenty of memory and CPU spare. At least it’s not cost me any money to reach this point, just many hours of my time which is always costed at £0/hour!
Who’d have thunk that setting up an email server could be so difficult! I guess I’m always trying to push the envelope of what normal people do though, so maybe I should have guessed 
Previously on this channel - I tried Stalwart-Mail. It’s a nice package but didn’t do (or seem to do) what I wanted, i.e. to act as an email smarthost, where any of my domains/applications can send a message to it for onward forwarding t the real recipient.
So then I investigated further and looked again at mailcow and Mail-in-a-Box. I quickly discounted Mail-in-a-Box which looks good but wasn’t suitable for what I wanted. So I thought I’d try the bovine mailcow (yes - no capitals).
mailcow went fairly well at first. It’s more complicated to set up with lots of containers needing to be run but it does a lot of that itself. I quickly set up my master mail domain and could send/receive test messages. Then rather than trying another relatively easy to set up domain I immediately targetted the sub-domain I had problems with on Stalwart. If I can’t get that working then there’s no point going further with mailcow.
To cut a long story short - I failed again. I got further than previously, but I couldn’t convince the sub-domain server to authenticate with the mail server. There are multiple settigs on the domain server and on the mail server but despite exhaustive log reviews and setting changes I couldn’t convince the mail server to let the domain server to log in.
So I gave up with attempt #2 and dug further into the options. That’s when I re-discovered the Docker Mailserver aka DMS. I’ve used it before when I first set out on the containerisation road-trip. I junked the installation that had DMS in it though and then opted for an out-sourced mail solution.
DMS is now installed and I have the master domain up and running. DMS configuration is a more manual process but that’s OK, I’m as happy with comand lines as I am with GUIs. I did have a nightmare start though. I got the master domain connected and could send mails to it from GMail, but then I tried connecting up Thunderbird so I could read the messages and send some back. Thunderbird just wouldn’t find the mail server and the mail server logs weren’t showing it attempting to access. Very weird…until I figured out that my PC was being blocked by the mail server. Thunderbird was still configured for accessing the previous mail server so the new mail server thought it was being attacked by someone trying to hack in so blocked my IP address.
I’m writing this as an avoidance technique! Next thing is to set up the sub-domain that’s failed with the two previous mail servers and I need a rest before diving in again 
Success - at last! Not without a bit more head scratching but I figured out the magic combination of configuration variables and have most of my domains migrated now.
Which leaves the domains most closely related to weather-watch.com. I’ve taken a quick look and I think it’s a relatively straightforward change, but I’m going to take longer look and make some notes tomorrow to be sure I’ve covered all the nuances of how mail works for these domains. So you’re safe for about 12 hours
There are three weather-watch domains that I use for different purposes. After some research…
I’ll be making the changes in the next 90 minutes so you might notice a slight delay to notification email deliveries during that time.
I’ve made all the changes I think I need to make and sent some email tests which seem to have gone through OK. It would be useful to get some feedback about whether you’re getting or not getting notification emails from the forum.
Got the last two (your post and @TheBreeze) OK!
I didn’t get anything yet
According to the logs there haven’t been any notifications to send to you yet. This post might trigger a message.
that did the trick! I got the notification