Fun with Email

For a while after moving in here and getting our new ISP, we were able to send our email through our server in Texas using port 25. That stopped working, so it was time to deal with the joys of managing with an ISP blocking port 25.

The first step was getting Postfix on our email server in Texas to use the submission port, port 587. There’s about six lines in Postfix’s “master.cf” configuration that have to be uncommented and restarting Postfix, plus making sure /etc/services has port 587 uncommented.

I tested things out using my Thunderbird email client, and things went fine, with just a dialog about accepting the SSL certificate from the email server. That made me feel good.

Then I tried to get Diane’s antique installation of Eudora to connect up. My mood went down. Trying to add “:587” to the SMTP server name resulted in Eudora not figuring out where the server was, despite various places online where Qualcomm says appending “:587” would fix things up. Another round of searching turned up an odd procedure: copy “esoteric.epi” up to the main Eudora directory, restart Eudora, then set the port for SMTP in the new “Ports” section of the Options part of the menu. That brought me to the next stop: SSL negotiation failed because the certificate had expired. Last year, Jeff handled getting the certificate set up, so now I got to work on the SSL certificate. But things did eventually fall into place, and our email now flows in its accustomed channels once again.