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Question

How to make a droplet send email?

  • Posted July 26, 2014

Hi,

I have installed CSF as the firewall for my droplet by following this tutorial: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-and-configure-config-server-firewall-csf-on-ubuntu

Now, in the sub-heading called Process Tracking, it says that CSF can be configured to send emails to the system admin about the various firewall processes. My questions are:

  1. Where do I add the system admin email id?
  2. I have CentOS with MySQL, PHP, Apache running. Will this automatically ensure system emails being sent out or do I need to add some email system?

Thanks in advance.

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cloudnine • July 29, 2014

@ Kamal Nasser, I would like to thank you once again for taking the time to answer my follow-up questions.

I really do appreciate your assistance.

cloudnine • July 28, 2014

Thanks, again. I will go with Postfix. As for Dovecot, I am planning to test a ticketing system on the droplet. Now, the actual mailboxes used for the tickets are hosted elsewhere, but an application on the droplet will pull in email from those mailboxes through IMAP and present them in the application’s web interface. I guess this means Dovecot would be required?

As for loopback_only, I found the following enabled in the Postfix config file: inet_interfaces = localhost

Is this the same as loopback_only?

cloudnine • July 27, 2014

@Kamal Nasser, thank you for your clear instructions, down to the specific commands to use. Believe it or not, this issue was a deal breaker for me when I got a Linode VPS. So, this is a win for DO, thank you, once again.

As for sendmail and postfix, I assume the following:

  • That you are suggesting removal of sendmail as it’s complex for a newbie
  • Restricting to loopback_only is for preventing open mail relays

Also, after installing Postfix, do I need to install Dovecot?

Kamal Nasser • July 27, 2014

Edit /etc/csf/csf.conf and set LF_ALERT_TO to your email address:

LF_ALERT_TO = "your@email.address"

and restart CSF:

csf -r

Make sure you have a mail transfer agent installed such as sendmail or postfix:

sudo yum remove sendmail
sudo yum install postfix

Edit /etc/postfix/main.cf and set inet_interfaces to loopback-only:

inet_interfaces = loopback-only

and finally, restart postfix:

sudo service postfix restart