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Okay, this is what I’m thinking. I want to play around with software that does email alerting. Nagios, Solar Winds, or even when Veeam sends alerts that jobs are done (or have failed).

I don’t need anything fancy for this and would be perfectly fine with something that works within my home network. I’d like to be able to create a mailbox on this server and point Outlook (or thunderbird) to it and get mail from the above mentioned services. And I certainly don’t want to go crazy and try and set up an exchange server for this.

I’m looking at hMailServer at the moment and might mess with setting it up this evening. Just wondering if anyone else has done something like this.

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I usually just use smtp settings from gmail

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Yeah tried hMailServer.
I’m currently using Elastix but I am planning to migrate to a pure Postfix/Dovecot system.
If your a Windows admin hMailServer would be a fine choice.

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I think MailEnable still offers a free version. I used to use it at home all the time.

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Yup you can also look at Zimbra, Citadel, Horde, iRedmail, and Roundcube are all pretty friendly. I have set them all up in digital ocean instances just be wary getting them to bypass spam filtering if they interact with the outside world can be interesting. For internal mail only they should be pretty easy.

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I have used hMailServer in the past and it worked fairly well. lately I have just be using a raspberry pi with exim. I have been VERY pleased with this setup. But if you dont have a raspberry pi laying around, hMailServer is perfectly up to the task.

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I would actually like to set something internal up for this. While I don’t want it to be complicated, gmail seems a little to easy too.

I think I’m going to start with hMailServer for now. I will look at some of the others mentioned if I don’t like it.

I like the idea of setting up a Pi for this. And while I know my way around linux, I don’t think I’m ready to tackle this particular one at the moment. I will be keeping it in mind for the future though.

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ive setup a web server using Sentora (Fork of zPanel) which works, and does emails internally.

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I’m using a Postfix/Dovecot system right now. Email is a seemingly simple, but relatively complex concept, at least for me, and it took me a few years till I finally sat down and committed to following the project through. I used Virtualmin to help me out with that though.

If you’re doing it at home, then the ISP will likely block mail coming in on port 25. When I first tried I got a letter from my ISP telling me about suspected spam when I tried sending out. My current setup is off on a colocated server so I could get past that.

Mail should work just fine for sending things around the same local machine. If you have your MX records for other machines pointing towards other local IP’s, then I imagine it should send to those just fine. I haven’t tried that though.

Using Postfix/Dovecot would be the way to set it up without too much other software messing with things. I personally haven’t tried anything else (Unless G-Suite counts)

Best of luck!

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I set up hMailServer last night.

  • Installed on a windows VM

  • Created a couple of accounts. One account for me to receive mail, and one account for veeam to send mail.

  • Turned off the server’s firewall. Need to go back and do this right and just let port 25 through.

  • Created an MX record on the lab DNS server.

  • Added my account to Outlook with manual setup and pointed it to the IP of the mail server.

  • Sent test email from Veeam.

  • Success!

Whole process took about 10 minutes.

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One more note from the install. In addition to opening up port 25 on the mail server VM, I had to open up port 110 for POP3 so that Outlook could still connect.

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Sorry late to the game but I have used Mailinabox really easy to setup and configure.