I noticed that I wasn’t getting many mails (I need better monitoring), and discovered that my iredmail server was poorly.
I have spent far too much time and energy on getting it back and working these past few days, but I’ve finally got it back up and stable.
Some background: I’ve had iredmail running for probably going on 6 years now and have had very few issues at all. It runs on an Ubuntu VM on Proxmox and originally was running in the same VM on ESXi (I migrated it over). I haven’t changed anything to do with the VM for years other than the Ubuntu LTS updates every 2-3 years, it’s always been there and stable. I occasionally will update the Ubuntu OS and iredmail itself, no problems.
Back to the problem… I noticed that Postfix was running OK, but was showing a bunch of errors about clamav not being able to connect. Odd. I then noticed that amavis was not running and had seemed to just die. I couldn’t find any reason in any log file. Very strange. Bunch of hunting, checking config file history in the git repo. Nothing significant for years.
Find that restarting the server got everything back up and running. Great, lets go to bed… Wake up next morning to find that amavis was dead again - it only lasted about 40 mins and then just closed for no reason. Right, ok, time to turn off clamAV as that seemed be be coming up a bit wheilst looking, follow the guide, all is well. Hmm, this seems to be working, but I don’t really want clamav off. A whole bunch of duck duck going and I still couldn’t figure out a root cause.
And then it clicked, the thing that was causing amavis to close was that it was running out of memory and it was being killed. Bump the memory up to 4GB and re-enable everything as it originally was and… it seems to have worked. Been going strong for over a day now.
I don’t know what it was that’s changed recently which has meant the memory requirements have gone up a bit, but at least it’s now fixed and it took all of 2 minutes to adjust.
Turning on the server is not enough, you need to configure PTR , DKIM , DMARC and SPF. If your ip address is some blacklist it is necessary to have it removed. Once this is done, it is rare for emails to go to Spam other than for content control.
I mean it happened to be mail, but it could have been any service on a server without enough resources. Just bad luck for me this time.
Setting up the mail server was a bit of a pain, but so was setting up a lemmy server. For 6 years it really has been plain sailing. So I was due a change in fortune, I guess
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Mail is the single thing that I absolutely refuse to self-host. Been there, got the scars.
Until I discovered docker-mailserver 😉
mailu and mailcow are also quite good
Thank you, I will keep an eye on them in case of any problems with docker-mailserver 👍
That doesn’t fix the trust issues. If you send mail to people on gmail and similar services it won’t go though
Turning on the server is not enough, you need to configure PTR , DKIM , DMARC and SPF. If your ip address is some blacklist it is necessary to have it removed. Once this is done, it is rare for emails to go to Spam other than for content control.
Unless of course you have a dynamic ip address.
Unfortunately, in that case you will have to rely on a vm on some external provider or a smtp relay service external to your network.
I opted for a vm on the cloud, because at home I have a CGNAT network with no ip.
Honestly you’re generally going to have a better time with email if you outsource it. There are just so many “oops lost email” scenarios.
Ah sorry, I thought we were in a community that deals with self-hosting.
If you prefer to use a free provider to also have to see advertisements in addition to spam, go ahead.
If you prefer to use one for a fee because you are not able to manage it on your own, go ahead.
It’s the beauty of open protocols.
I mean it happened to be mail, but it could have been any service on a server without enough resources. Just bad luck for me this time.
Setting up the mail server was a bit of a pain, but so was setting up a lemmy server. For 6 years it really has been plain sailing. So I was due a change in fortune, I guess
Could not agree more.
I believe you will see OOM errors in journalctl. Also considered a systemd service or something to restart the process?
Glad you figured it out though!
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
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