One more question I should know the answer to but am not sure of.
The debian Buster system I use for email presently uses fetchmail
to get mail from the ISP and is configured to use that ISP's
smarthost for out-going mail. I do not want to effect
(= muck this up) this functionality because it works well for
now.
Shouldn't I be able to install an imap server on the
debian box and forward messages of interest to it, then reach
imap4 on the private net from any system that speaks imap or has
an imap client?
That would do what I need to do.
When I was researching, the article in wikipedia I read
said that many commercial systems have email clients which
understand imap, pop3, etc. The systems likely to do this on our
network are a windows10 box, an iMac and maybe an iPad. The idea
would be to forward an email message needing this attention to
imap on the linux box, contact the Linux box from one of the
devices I mentioned, and download the message at which point it
would e as if that system had been hooked up to the ISP and
received it.
I was all ready to use .local as our domain name and then
I looked that up and there is a good wikipedia article which
explains how that is problematic and recommends using something
like .lan, .office or something else that isn't likely to be
registered as a top-level resolvable domain name.
The machine I receive email on presently would be a good
candidate for running a mdns but our netgear router advertises
whatever dns's the isp uses for obvious reasons and that's fine
but it would be nice if the mdns's address could also be known to clients
on our network which could make DNS queries to each other's names
that would resolve properly.
Is there a way to advertise the mdns so that the router
picks it up but doesn't drop the internet DNS's that we all need
to resolve the rest of the world?
I do remember when I was working, we explored open-source
network authentication systems which involved fake DNS's that one
had to advertise as such so their information wouldn't corrupt
the proper working DNS's which could really mess things up if
somebody happened to pickup and cache the wild card * that sent
all new supplicants to the authentication server after they were
already up and running.
In our case, the corruption would be okay and done for
good reasons but the dhcp server in our router already advertises two
domain name servers so ours would have to be learned about by
discovery.
Thanks again.
Martin McCormick
