Individual Mail Relay

See our bulk mail relay documentation for information about how our bulk and list email is relayed.

See filter-check - a script for detecting if our email is going to spam boxes.

This page describes how email is relayed via mail.mayfirst.org, which is used by our individual email clients to send mail.

Servers

We have two individual mail relay servers: gil.mayfirst.org and paulo.mayfirst.org.

The servers are both for proxying IMAP and POP connections and also provide smtp relay service for authenticated users using postfix and saslauthd.

IP allocation

IPs are allocated via puppet via the gil.pp and paulo.pp puppet files.

When an IP gets blocked or otherwise becomes un-usable, follow these steps:

• Read both gil.pp and paulo.pp for comments about past abuse reports for IP addresses previously assigned
• Pick a new IP address and add it both as an A record and PTR record pointing to the host (e.g. gil.mayfirst.org or paulo.mayfirst.org)
• Add it to the .pp file - both using m_interface::set AND also using the smtp_bind_ip argument of m_mailsubmission
• Commit and push
• Run ifup <interface> if you added a new interface

The new IP will be automatically added to our spf.mayfirst.org record once a day - but you can manually make that happen with:

ssh root@hay.mayfirst.org 
su -l www-data -c 'cd /usr/local/share/red/ui/sbin/ && DNS_LOOKUP_LOGIN="dns-lookup@wiwa.mayfirst.org" ./red-spf-generator'