Lightweight local mail transfer agent

Question

I'd like to have a very lightweight and easy mail transfer agent on my server. The only purpose of this MTA is to buffer outgoing email messages locally and forward them to ISP's mail servers.

What options Ubuntu offers?

Criteria

• Easy to configure for forwarding purposes

• Simple - average user can understand how it works

• Secure - outside traffic is disabled

• No incoming email support needed

I have had various issues with sendmail and other complex solutions which are overkill for my modest needs.

Solution 1

What you are looking for is Nullmailer. Simple and lightweight with almost no configuration. Check this post:

• http://www.htpcbeginner.com/lightweight-mail-server-for-linux-nullmailer-mta/

It has been a perfect solution for my self-hosted Ubuntu server. Hope this helps!

Solution 2

postfix is what I'd use and it can accomplish what you're after but I'm not sure it checks all your criteria.

As far as simple goes, I'm not sure there's on MTA that's even slightly simple. Postfix isn't insanely hard to understand and you will get a nice installer to create the default configuration (that you can call again after installation from sudo dpkg-reconfigure postfix), but it's not something "just anybody" should be setting up.

Relaying email isn't hard but you can run into problems with some SASL issues if you don't install the right packages (libsasl2-2 libsasl2-modules ca-certificates).

Security is mainly a case of firewalling things so external people can't connect. Again, not hard. Either do it with your router or ufw on the server (sudo ufw deny smtp).

Basically, you all you need is Google on your side.

Comments

[Mikko Ohtamaa]

I am asking for mail transfer agent, not an email client. They are totally different thing, sorry.

[Mikko Ohtamaa]

In the end, I had to settle to Postfix: opensourcehacker.com/2013/03/26/…