Don Anthony wrote:
[...] No, the server I use is a small rented space on a "hosting" one of
these bare bones Redhat Unix that has a SNMP/POP3 server and 50M of disk
space that they attach to the domain name you lease. They prohibited Telnet
but I just upgraded to get SSH/Telnet. Again, I am so dumb here it hurts.
I am pretty sure they would not allow a daemon because it is not advertised,
but I don't know.
Don, I can sympathize with your situation. I'm using a similar $2/mo. hosting setup with 10MB disk and 10 "live" email accounts. They provide a "default" account (optionally), and "unlimited aliases", but little else. I used this setup to host my own domain in anticipation of upcoming moves, and not wanting to lose email when switching providers (again.) I have essentially no rights on the hosted server. What I do is use the fetchmail program to retrieve mail from that hosted setup via POP3, then process/filter everything locally on a Linux box. This won't be any simpler, but you may appreciate the additional control it gives you. You won't experience the joy of rejecting spam before it's accepted, but then you can't do that now anyhow. What you CAN do is accept all inbound mail to your domain (or account), and virus scan, spam filter and mangle to your heart's content.
Part of your frustration is, I suspect, due to not having control over what's going on. You may prefer the joys (and sorrow) of setting up your own Linux (or BSD) box as a "home server" for this sort of thing. That way, you can pick up a couple of books on your distribution of choice, and learn it well. While none are perfect, most of the more popular distributions do a good job of setting things up in a way that all the tools work well together. Finally, you also get the thrill of knowing the box your doing all this on probably has a much horsepower as some of the "big iron" you used in the old days. :)
Just some thoughts. Good luck with whatever approach you go with!
- Bob
