I’m confusing the terms smarthost with relayhost; both servers have the function to deliver mail; can anyone tell my this? I’ve been searching over this forum and google… but no clear answer found… Before I thought an smarthost was a box wich with your smtp communicates for transfering to it all smtp outbound mail and this one will deliver all mails to other internet smtp servers…
Another thing…
I’m the system administrator of my company and my boss wanted to give mail service to our customers (for the fact of being customers) I think the ideal structure for us is the next :
Domino box with POP and IMAP protocol (this last only answering to squirrelmail)
Debian box running postfix for inbound smtp mail
Another Debian box running postfix for outbound smtp mail
And Another box for web hosting in wich be hosted the squirrel and web pages…
My question is…
For saving resources I can give as smtp server the ip of the postfix mail server (supporting this one auth) BUT for incoming mail Should I set the incoming smtp postfix as smarthost in the Domino configuration? Would this last idea save resources on my domino box? or could be the same resources as if domino box uses it’s own smtp server for incoming smtp?
No. The SmartHost does not deliver your outbound mail.
I don’t understand why you want your outbound and inbound mail going through the postfix servers, but I’m sure you’ve got a good reason. In any case, if I’m understanding your requirements at all…
Assume debian1 and debian2 are your two hostnames.
Assume domino1 is your Domino server’s hostname.
debian1 will be your primary MX. It will handle your inbound mail. In its configuration, you will set it up to route all mail to Domino. I don’t know anything about configuring postfix, but if it follows the same vocabulary as many other MTAs, you’ll be telling postfix onb debian1 that domino1 is its SmartHost.
To send all your outbound mail through debian2, you will put debian2 in the Relay Server field in your Domino server’s configuration document.
As for saving resources, if you’re handing a very high volume of mail, and a large percentage of your outbound messages go to multiple recipients, then using debian2 as your relay will save some resources on your Domino server.
AFAIK, you won’t save any mail delivery resources on domino1 for inbound mail – but if your intention is to have debian1 do anti-spam and anti-virus processing for inbound mail, then you’ll definitely be reducing the load on domino1.
First of all thank very much for all people are helping me, I’m very thanked.
So let’s see if I had understand you correcly. So you tell me I’ll save resources having a primary mx machine in wich I scan for viruses and spam… and not giving that job to primary domino server and this one only to storage mails in databases. So for this configuration I should nat port 25 of my router to debian postfix machine (or to a Domino server using as a primary mx machine) and set in this machine as smarthost (for receiving finally clean mail) the primary domino server in wich mails are storaged, am I wrong? How could or wich parameter must be set for enabling a machine as a primary mx? (or only making a nat to his 25 port it’s got?
Since you are behind a NAT firewall, that changes things.
The firewall’s external address will be your primary MX. (You set that up in DNS, and if you’re already receiving mail then it’s safe to assume that this is already taken care of.) Then you just set your firewall to forward port 25 to the postfix machine, which presumably has appropriate anti-spam and anti-virus software. Finally you configure the postfix machine so that it knows that Domino is the SmartHost, so it will forward messages to Domino for delivery into users mailboxes. That takes care of inbound.
For outbound, you configure Domino so that it uses a postfix machine as the Relay server.
And BTW: I don’t see a good reason why you need two postfix machines. Unless you have a very high load, one server should be able to handle all your inbound mail and all your outbound mail simultaneously.
If a Relay Host is configured, then when Domino is sending outbound Internet mail to someone outside of its own Internet domain, it will send the message to the Relay Host no matter who the recipient is. This is useful for lowering the load on your primary server, but the main reasons for having a Relay Host these days are probably (a) to keep your primary server inside the firewall while still having a server that is in your DMZ (or outside your firewall) make all your outbound connections, or (b) to allow a server that has a dynamic IP address to route mail to domains that blacklist all dynamic IPs.
If a SmartHost is configured, when Domino receives inbound Internet mail it checks to see if the address matches a user in the Domino Directory. If there is no match, then the message is sent to the SmartHost. This is useful when you have a split environment with some Domino mail users and some non-Domino users. The SmartHost configuration allows you to configure your Domino server as the primary MX for your domain and forward any messages it can’t deliver on to a different mail system.
Thank you very much for you’re help; I’ve read before that information but my question is the fact for routing mail though domino primary server (because the nat of the port on the internet router will be mapped to primary server) to relay server could not consume more or less the same resources as you used the primary smtp server? so my question is a routation could consume more or less the same as relaying over smtp primary server to Internet domains?