Running own mail server

[Jason Montleon]

>Just don't learn at the expense of others.  A badly configured server
>can cause collateral damage, both in increasing SPAM and blacklisting
>innocent users that have IP addreses 'near' yours.

Agreed.  Personally, to me the best way to learn if you want, is to set up 
your internal network as an intranet.  For instance, I have mydomain.com 
which is now hosted and independent of all my junk at home.  Here at home, I 
have mydomain.intra.  What I do in here affects no one but me and my (ever 
patient) wife.  To be honest, even with our five computers I don't even 
bother running anything much other than Samba, so that we can keep our stuff 
on a RAID, as my wife has some horrible curse with failing disks.  Even name 
resolution I just set up host files, because with the 4 systems I would want 
to access by name it is not worth setting up DDNS....  But you can set up 
your own internal DNS server, use Dynamic DNS, secure pop, secure smtp, 
Samba, and anything else you want, and not run the risk of bothering anyone 
else on the internet, or invoking the wrath of your ISP.

With a couple of machines, Fedora, and VMware Server and/or Xen you can set 
up two domains in your house firewall them behind iptables firewall with 
virtual networks, send mail back and forth between them, learn to lock them 
down, and everything else under the sun...  You can make a mess fast and 
make no one want to slam their head against a desk but you.  You can also 
download Solaris 10, FreeBSD, and Novell Netware (they have a 5 User 
unlimited time Demo out there somewhere on their site), Windows Server 90 
day licenses and so on and really keep yourself busy.  Set up NFS, RIS and 
Software Distribution Servers, Samba servers for Windows Clients; your 
options, and ability to learn, are virtually limitless with a couple 
computers these days... and really if you can learn to hop on any *nix or 
windows/whatever system, and have a good fundamental knowledge of networks, 
you only make yourself more valuable.  It won't teach you everything there 
is to know about a corporate network, but it will get you on your way... 
beside being able to sit in front of a Novell, Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, 
or Mac system, and feeling comfortable is a good feeling.