please explain to me why postfix isn't completely worthless

Hi

Ever since I began using postfix, a LOT of my mail is rejected by
various ISPs as spam.

I am not a spammer, just a regular guy who sends maybe 10 emails a day,
on a busy day.

But these days, most ISPs - especially the big ones like Yahoo and
Hotmail and Gmal, etc - reject anything that is not sent through a
recognized mail server.

So much for net neutrality!

How can postfix be used without my messages being tagged as spam?

thanks!

On Fri, 02 May 2008 18:54:56 -0500
jt <tikibars@NOSPAMyahoo.com> wrote:

> Hi
>
> Ever since I began using postfix, a LOT of my mail is rejected by
> various ISPs as spam.
>
> I am not a spammer, just a regular guy who sends maybe 10 emails a
> day, on a busy day.
>
> But these days, most ISPs - especially the big ones like Yahoo and
> Hotmail and Gmal, etc - reject anything that is not sent through a
> recognized mail server.
>
> So much for net neutrality!
>
> How can postfix be used without my messages being tagged as spam?

I understand your frustration, but it's not the software. There's a lot
of infrastructure involved in running a mail server that you probably
won't have in place already.

The biggest reason that mail gets rejected is that DNS isn't configured
properly. Almost all mail servers are configured to reject mail if the
R PTR record doesn't match or if the sending server identifies itself
by IP address rather than a name. You have to contact your ISP to ask
for a reverse pointer if you haven't done so already. If you have that
in place and your mail is still being rejected then look up Sender
Policy Framework. It's easy to implement in DNS, but the control panel
for your domain needs to support TXT records. If your registrar doesn't
offer that than you'll either need to set up BIND for yourself or use a
DNS service like ZoneEdit.com.

For 10 emails a day, you're better off configuring postfix to use your
ISP as a relay if they permit it or ditching the mail server completely
if you always use a regular email client.

Chris

On Fri, 02 May 2008 19:49:45 -0700, Chris Babcock wrote:

Two points:

>> How can postfix be used without my messages being tagged as spam?
>
Easiest is to send your mail via your ISP's mail server. Use the
relayhost directive to make Postfix send outgoing mail to it. The ISP
won't care whether the SMPT connection is from a mail reader or Postfix.

> For 10 emails a day, you're better off configuring postfix to use your
> ISP as a relay if they permit it or ditching the mail server completely
> if you always use a regular email client.
>
There's little point in you using Postfix unless you have a private LAN
and want to handle all mail via a central point. I route all mail
through a central MTA for two reasons:

1) I want logwatch reports from all machines on my LAN to be delivered
to my normal mailbox

2) I archive all mail sent and received on my LAN. This means that I can
keep my mail reader folders small and, because the archive is indexed,
its by far the fastest way to find any particular piece of mail.

Any MTA could do these jobs, but I use Postfix because its much easier to
configure than Sendmail. Besides, the O'Reilly Sendmail book is both
badly organised and incomplete: its the only bad O'Reilly book I've found.


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