User:Paul/sandbox/Mail-in-a-Box with Namecheap and Vultr

Configuring a mail server has never been easier than it is today with Mail-in-a-Box (MiaB), a free and open source project that automatically configures everything required to have a personal mail server.

This article covers installing MiaB using Namecheap as a registrar and Vultr as a VPS provider. It assumes an understanding of basic command line skills and establishing remote SSH sessions. For those who are new to SSH, please see the Intro to command line article.

Advantages and disadvantages

Nothing is without risk and everything has advantages and disadvantages, especially when evaluating mail servers.

Advantages

The primary advantage to having a personal mail server is the mail is only viewable to ISP admins with access to the server and the ISP customer using the server. Most ISP admins are generally unconcerned with anything that isn't criminal or damaging to their servers, as their business model does not incorporate amassing vast amounts of data to analyze and sell. (Note that is possible to serve MiaB from a local, physical computer, but that configuration is not covered in this article.)

MiaB also has the advantage of hosting nearly as many domains, email address, and aliases as desired, so users desiring different email address for different purposes can easily create one for every desired need.

MiaB includes an automated backup system that, when properly utilized, can completely restore the installation should something happen to the

Disadvantages

Disadvantages include more time required in managing the service. MiaB does do most of the heavy lifting automatically, but it is necessary to log into the server every now and then to perform some basic housekeeping.

Security comes in various forms, and while the developers of MiaB have gone to good length to provide a reasonable amount of security in the project, it is not possible to have a mail server as secure as one managed by professional administrators. This is largely due to professionals having network and firewall diagnostic tools that are beyond the scope of what is necessary for a typical personal mail server or reasonable even for enthusiasts to manage.

Time: Anyone reading this article is likely new to administrating a mail server, and there is also a good chance the same person is brand new to server administration, in general. This will mean that even with a fantastic project such as MiaB, there will be a lot to learn in order install and maintain MiaB. There is some additional time required to maintain MiaB on a weekly basis of usually not more than 20 minutes, and then every four years or so there will be a major time project of migrating MiaB to a new version of the server operating system that may require an entire weekend, though the project has been working hard to minimize the time and pain of these evolutions, as the maintainers of the project also do not like spending so much time.

Create and establish domain or domains

Where there are many domain registrars to choose from, not all domain registrars support all of the features necessary to run MiaB.

Namecheap provides all features necessary to run MiaB as standard with all domains managed by Namecheap. They also offer additional features such as free whois record privacy and a free mail forwarding service when using their free DNS service - particularly useful if a server should ever go away completely.

For domains not registered with Namecheap, transferring the domain will require purchasing an additional 12 months of registration for Namecheap to accept the domain.

Maintenance

Updates

When running an update of packages it is normal to see something similar to the following:

username@servername:~$ sudo apt-get upgrade 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
  base-files netplan.io ubuntu-server
The following packages will be upgraded:
  apport libc-bin libc-dev-bin libc6 libc6-dev locales multiarch-support
  python3-apport python3-problem-report
9 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.
Need to get 9,967 kB of archives.
After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] 

Note that it is normal for some packages to be kept back.

reboot-required

Check to see if /run/reboot-required exists:

username@servername:~$ ll /run/reboot-required
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 32 Dec 18 07:07 /run/reboot-required

When this file is present the server should be rebooted:

username@servername:~$ sudo reboot

Ubuntu version upgrades

Ubuntu versions will be in the form of 18.04.x, 20.04.x, etc.

The server will sometimes include a message to upgrade to a newer version of Ubuntu using the do-release-upgrade or possibly other commands.

Never upgrade Ubuntu to a new version of Ubuntu in MiaB because it will break MiaB.