[PLUG] Mail, Maillists, and Web site: DNS Issues

[Jim Garrison]

On 4/1/2015 12:04 PM, Rich Shepard wrote:
>    This may be an intractable issue, or it may have a solution not visible to
> me from my non-professional perspective.
> 
>    My Web site is hosted at aracnet, and that's where Mailman is installed
> and four maillists (for non-profit orgs, not my bueiness) established. The
> IP address is that of the Web site.
> 
>    The MX for my mail has a diffeent IP address; the local one that Frontier
> changes a number of times each evening and night.
> 
>    Testing the maillists fails because they're hosted at the Web site IP
> address and the MX for my mail is a different IP address; mail cannot be
> delivered properly.
> 
>    I could install and configure Mailman here, but do not have apache open to
> the world. Configuring it securely, and keeping it secure, would be a burden
> on my time since that's not part of my core business.
> 
>    Might there be a solution for this DNS conflict that would not require
> major time and effort to maintain?

The simplest setup would be to receive all email at the server
with the consistent static IP (make that system the MX).
This would make Mailman configuration simple.  Then, for your personal
email you could use IMAP/SSL on your dynamic IP system to read the mail
locally. Or, have the MX system forward mail to your home system,
and use the MX as the smarthost for outgoing mail from home.

Trying to host SMTP on a server whose IP address changes regularly
is an exercise in futility, as you are discovering.

-- 
Jim Garrison (jhg at acm.org)
PGP Keys at http://www.jhmg.net RSA 0x04B73B7F DH 0x70738D88