Setting up Postfix and Dovecot Slowly and Properly

Back in 2015 I embarked on an ambitious plan to blog my entire way through setting up my own selfhosted email server. I got a fair bit in (5 posts) before the setting up got ahead of the blogging and I lost track of scribbled notes and halfwritten posts. Moving to a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 install I decided to move as many services as possible to containers, including my email setup and so, rather than just copy paste my old config files I dug into the basics of email setup again.

With some fresh motivation I intend to plough on in the sadly inelegantly titled series “Let’s do Postfix again but slowly and properly this time” (as in the opposite of a quick an’ dirty “that’ll do” type setup) and extend it with some Dovecot posts. The general guidelines of the series are

• A modicum of understanding of the general behind-the-scenes workings. What is the role of the MTA vs. the MDA? What does an IMAP-login actually look like in telnet? No deep dive stuff, just sufficient for our needs.
• Always understand whatever setting we’re tinkering with. No copy-pasta.
• Start from a primitive setup and work our way up. We need to understand what we’re doing so we eschew all the fancy stuff until we’re ready.
• Each post end with a working setup or a full upgrade.
• Write the kind of guide I would have liked to have found when setting up my email server.

The old posts

1. Postfix 1: A simple local mail receiving server
2. Postfix 2: Address manipulation
3. Postfix 3: Opening up to the outside
4. Postfix 4: Virtual domains
5. Postfix 5: Relaying from the local network

Planned new posts

I will probably get distracted halfway through once again because the best laid plans of mice and men etc. For what it’s worth here’s my roadmap:

1. Dovecot 1: Basic Dovecot
2. Dovecot 2: Authentication with dovecot (including ssl connection and safe passdb)
3. Postfix 6: Postfix authentication with SASL
4. Postfix 7: Encryption
5. Postfix 8: PTR and SPF records
6. Dovecot 3: LMTP
7. Dovecot 4: Filtering with Sieve
8. Postfix 9: Rspamd
9. Postfix 10: Restricting access
10. Postfix 11: pflogsumm
11. Postfix 12: DKIM
12. Postfix 13: DMARC
13. Postfix 14: DMARC 2 (incoming email)