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Showing posts with the label dovecot

How to enable user authentication for a Postfix SMTP server with SASL

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I had originally written this tutorial for xmodulo.com Every mail server administrator dreads his or her server becoming compromised by spammers. A lot of effort, time and even money is spent on securing mail servers and making sure that the servers do not become open relay. To combat against spambots in an SMTP server, Postfix in general uses the  mynetworks  parameter to specify the trusted sender network i.e., LAN. In a typical scenario, the users stationed in the internal LAN are legitimate users, and Postfix will happily accept SMTP requests from them, and forward the emails towards destination. Although this used to be the standard practice in the past, today's users want mobility. Everyone wants to be able to send/receive emails in their phones/tablets/laptops at work, home, on the go, or even from their favorite coffee shop around the corner. For people who are in the fields for critical services, a simple email alert could save a lot of time, effort and money. ...

How to secure a mail server using encryption

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I had originally written this tutorial for xmodulo.com SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and its descendant TLS (Transport Layer Security) are the most widely used protocols for encrypting data that is exchanged between a server and a client. These protocols often use X.509 certificates and asymmetric cryptography. STARTTTLS is another method of securing plain-text communication. This protocol also encrypts data with SSL or TLS, but with the same port as the plain-text protocols, instead of using separate ports for SSL/TLS-encrypted communications. For example, IMAP over STARTTLS uses the same port as IMAP (143), while IMAPS (IMAP over SSL) uses a separate port 993. The previous tutorial  describes how to set up a mail server running on Postfix and Dovecot, but the  security  aspect was not covered. In this tutorial, we demonstrate  how to add security to a mail server through TLS/SSL-based encryption . Certificates needed for TLS/SSL can be self-signed, signed by ...