Postfix or other mail forwarding server on Polisy

[TriLife]

Greetings.

So, I'm being told that using an Arduino to send email or get information from the web is opening up my entire network to hacking... They recommend that I use a mail forwarding server within my control to protect myself. Postfix shows up most often.

Can I install postfix on Polisy, and which command do I use? Sorry for the dumb question here. Not really familiar with Linux yet.

While we're at dumb questions: can you point me in the right direction of which Linux command set to use? It seems there are several around, not necessarily compatible, as I found out.

Cheers...

[mwester]

The Polisy is not suited to perform that function.  It's not a Linux device (it's FreeBSD, which is just similar enough to make it infuriating to work with).  There's also a whole lot of packages that commonly recommended and used with email installations in-home, such as anti-virus, etc -- so you'd need a lot more packages than just the one.  Again, just to be clear (because somebody is going to respond with "Of Course You Can!") -- yes, you can make it do this.  But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to make it do that.

What *is* a good idea is to set up a simple Raspberry Pi for that purpose.  Well documented, cheap, and it won't mess up your Polisy in any way!

[TriLife]

16 hours ago, mwester said:

The Polisy is not suited to perform that function.  It's not a Linux device (it's FreeBSD, which is just similar enough to make it infuriating to work with).  There's also a whole lot of packages that commonly recommended and used with email installations in-home, such as anti-virus, etc -- so you'd need a lot more packages than just the one.  Again, just to be clear (because somebody is going to respond with "Of Course You Can!") -- yes, you can make it do this.  But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to make it do that.

What *is* a good idea is to set up a simple Raspberry Pi for that purpose.  Well documented, cheap, and it won't mess up your Polisy in any way!

Most helpful information. Thanks Mwester.

That, of course, begs the question: does Polisy do anything that an Rpi doesn't? I just started using the Polisy and have only two applications running on it: MQTT node server (to connect my Sonoff switches) and WeatherLink (to connect to my Weather station).

If I do use this mail forwarding server, it would really only serve the purpose of isolating my Arduino from the evil, evil Internet. I'll never receive or open an e-mail that comes in there... I'm perfectly happy with my Gmail setup or everything else...

Thanks again

[mwester]

"does Polisy do anything that an Rpi doesn't?"  -- good question... as of TODAY (August 13, 2020), the answer is no.  However, in the future, you'll find that will change.  The future for Polyglot seems to indicate that the newer versions will only run on the Polisy, and that "paid" nodeservers will only be available on the Polisy (the reason for this is that the Polisy includes the necessary encryption hardware to support this (a TPM chip), something that isn't available on an RPi).  In the distant future, you may find that the ISY hardware itself will be replaced by the Polisy -- that'll never happen on an RPi.

However, even if you chose to put Polyglot and your MQTT stuff on an RPi (and put your Polisy on the shelf), I wouldn't recommend that you put an email service on that same RPi.  Running an email server constitutes a very significant "attack surface" in terms of network security, and it would be foolish to put more stuff on that compute device than you absolutely must have.  In fact, I'd put the RPi running the email stuff on its own isolated VLAN, and firewall it off from the rest of the network completely.