Read Me
E-MailRelay Readme
==================
Introduction
------------
E-MailRelay is a lightweight SMTP store-and-forward mail server with POP access
to spooled messages. It can be used as a personal internet mail server with
SpamAssassin spam filtering and DNSBL connection blocking. Forwarding can be
to a fixed smarthost or using DNS MX routing. External scripts can be used for
address validation and e-mail message processing.
E-MailRelay runs as a single process using the same non-blocking i/o model as
Squid and nginx giving excellent scalability and resource usage.
Quick start
-----------
E-MailRelay can be run straight from the command-line, and on Windows you can
run "emailrelay.exe" or "emailrelay-textmode.exe" from the zip file without
going through the installation process.
To use E-MailRelay in store-and-forward mode use the "--as-server" option to
start the storage daemon in the background, and then do delivery of spooled
messages by running with "--as-client".
For example, to start a storage daemon in the background listening on port 10025
use a command like this:
emailrelay --as-server --port 10025 --spool-dir /tmp
On Windows use "c:/temp" for testing, rather than "/tmp".
Or to run it in the foreground:
emailrelay --log --no-daemon --port 10025 --spool-dir /tmp
And then to forward the spooled mail to "smtp.example.com" run something
like this:
emailrelay --as-client smtp.example.com:25 --spool-dir /tmp
To forward continuously you can add the "--poll" and "--forward-to" options to
the server command-line:
For example, this starts a server that also forwards spooled-up e-mail every
minute:
emailrelay --as-server --poll 60 --forward-to smtp.example.com:25
Or for a server that forwards each message as soon as it has been received, you
can use "--forward-on-disconnect":
emailrelay --as-server --forward-on-disconnect --forward-to smtp.example.com:25
To edit or filter e-mail as it passes through the server specify your filter
program with the "--filter" option, something like this:
emailrelay --as-server --filter /tmp/set-from.js
Look for example filter scripts in the "examples" directory.
E-MailRelay can also be used as a personal internet mail server:
Use "--remote-clients" ("-r") to allow connections from outside the local
network, define your domain name with "--domain" and use an address verifier as
a first line of defense against spammers:
emailrelay --as-server -v -r --domain=example.com --address-verifier=account:
Then enable POP access to the incoming e-mails with "--pop", "--pop-port" and
"--pop-auth":
emailrelay ... --pop --pop-port 10110 --pop-auth /etc/emailrelay.auth
Set up the POP account with a user-id and password in the "--pop-auth" secrets
file. The secrets file should contain a single line of text like this:
server plain <userid> <password>
For more information on the command-line options refer to the reference guide
or run:
emailrelay --help --verbose
Autostart
---------
To install E-MailRelay on Windows run the "emailrelay-setup" program and choose
the automatic startup option on the last page so that E-MailRelay runs as a
Windows service. Use the Windows "Services" utility to configure the E-MailRelay
service as automatic or manual startup.
To install E-MailRelay on Linux from a RPM package:
sudo rpm -i emailrelay*.rpm
Or from a DEB package:
sudo dpkg -i emailrelay*.deb
To get the E-MailRelay server to start automatically you should check the
configuration file "/etc/emailrelay.conf" is as you want it and then run the
following commands to activate the "systemd" service:
systemctl enable emailrelay
systemctl start emailrelay
systemctl status emailrelay
On other Linux systems try some combination of these commands to set up and
activate the E-MailRelay service:
cp /usr/lib/emailrelay/init/emailrelay /etc/init.d/
update-rc.d emailrelay enable
rc-update add emailrelay
invoke-rc.d emailrelay start
service emailrelay start
tail /var/log/messages
tail /var/log/syslog
On BSD systems add this line to /etc/rc.conf:
emailrelay_enable="YES"
Documentation
-------------
The following documentation is provided:
* README -- this document
* COPYING -- the GNU General Public License
* INSTALL -- generic build & install instructions
* AUTHORS -- authors, credits and additional copyrights
* userguide.txt -- user guide
* reference.txt -- reference document
* ChangeLog -- change log for releases
Source code documentation will be generated when building from source if
"doxygen" is available.
Feedback
--------
To give feedback, including reviews, bug reports and feature requests, please
use the SourceForge project website at https://sourceforge.net/projects/emailrelay