I'm just getting into managing servers and am enjoying myself tinkering with things. Right now, I have a domain name and a private server hosting my website on said domain. Right now I'd like to set up email so I can have whatever@mydomain.com be my email address. However, I've got too much tied to my current gmail account to abandon it, so now I'm looking for a way to send email as whatever@mydomain.com from gmail and simply forward all email received by whatever@mydomain.com to my gmail account. I have no idea what I'm doing here, so if I'm saying something that doesn't make any sense... well... correct me :)

What I have:

A gmail account

A server (with Ubuntu Server and nginx)

A domain name

A DNS with (MX) records I can edit

What I want:

(Part 1) Very simple, minimal resource system on my server that allows me to receive email at whatever@mydomain.com, and immediately forwards that to my gmail account. (Part 2) I also want to be logged into my gmail account and be able to send email as whatever@mydomain.com. I want all email transmitted and received by my server to be encrypted (I have an SSL certificate, if that's necessary). I don't want to be able to log into my mail server and check my email that way (through a web client). I only want to interact with it through my gmail account. Basically, I don't even want to know (from a usability standpoint) that my server exists. Also, I don't want to do any spam filtering, as I expect gmail to take care of that.

What I think I need to do (but have no idea if I'm headed in the right direction):

For part 1, I think I need to setup some kind of mail proxy server (correct me if I'm wrong!). From what little googling I've done, I've heard nice things about Postfix, but am still completely unsure of what to do. For part 2, I'm sure I need to set up my proxy to use SMTP, but again, that all depends on what program I've chosen to act as my proxy.

My question:

Do you have any direction you can offer me on this? I'm not even sure if an email proxy is what I want, so if you can at least tell me the words I should be googling or the right name of things I should be using, that would help a lot. Is Postfix able to be a simple, thin mail proxy?

I can't help sadly but I just want to subscribe to this thread. I am also having mail issues with my VPS.

Setting up mail servers in Linux is nasty business.

This is why I never touch Linux based servers unless there is a gun pointed at my head. Massively overcomplicated.

On Windows SE, once I have a dedicated IP, I set up a basic hMailServer and that's it.

Okay, here's what I've done. From what little testing I've done, it's working great. If anyone has any insights, I would love to hear them (because I have no clue what I'm doing).

Install postfix:

apt-get install postfix

It will go through a setup process. I selected "Internet website" (or whatever it was called... not "satellite" or "smart host" etc.). Give it the server name you want (for example, do domain.com if you want to receive email at user@domain.com). I then edited aliases:

vim /etc/aliases

And set up aliases for users:

user1: user1email@gmail.com

user2: user2email@gmail.com

Saved and closed, and then refresh with newaliases

newaliases

And then reloaded postfix:

postfix reload

Now, when I send email to user1@domain.com it immediately gets forwarded to user1email@gmail.com (similarly for user2). Note that user1 and user2 are not actual usernames on my server. They're just aliases that exists in the postfix mailing system. Also, they do not receive email on the system (that is, email sent to user1@domain.com does not get saved on the server; it immediately gets forwarded to user1email@gmail.com).

I'm going to double check things and make sure everything is being encrypted like it should be...

Okay, so I just did the following:

vim /etc/postfix/main.cf

Add the following:

Why are you doing this exactly? You've introduced a single point of failure in your email delivery system. A system which is designed to be stable and redundant That's why you can have multiple MX records. You'd be much better served just using Google Apps if you want Gmail for your custom domain.

Yeah, I know. I've been thinking about the single point of failure. I don't want to pay for Google Apps though, nor do I want yet another Google account (I've got like 5 or so already, the last thing I want is another one; I wish they could all be merged into the same account, but they can't).

One major reason for doing this is to learn. I've never done much server work, so I'm learning a ton by doing this. Seeing as this email will not be used for anything critical, I'm okay if it goes down with my server.