Mailcow on private server behind a VPS

Saeijou

Hello Everyone,

I am going insane. I am trying for a week now to get my mailcow working properly.
I have the same issue as described here:
https://community.mailcow.email/d/4010-reverse-proxy-all-ports-from-remote-vps-to-mailcow-retain-client-ip

However, the solution didn’t work for me.

I have mailcow running on my homeserver, with a wireguard connection between my router and a VPS.

In general everything is working, however I can’t channel the original IP of senders through onto my homeserver.

I tried several approaches so far:

haproxy –> the sender IP shows as 10.0.0.1 (internal IP of my VPS)
frp –> the sender IP shows as the internal IP of my homeserver
splitting mailcow for running the frontend on the VPS and the backend on my homeserver caused a whole bunch of other issues

I also can’t find any proper documentation of anyone having done something besides the threat mentioned above.

Does anyone know how to get this working properly?

Thank you!

With gratitude,
Stephan.

Saeijou

I found a solution. I installed postfix and rspamd on my VPS

Those now take the mail and filter it, and then forward it to my homeserver.

There I just whitelist everything that comes from my internal IP and won’t bother about it anymore.

DocFraggle

Saeijou I installed postfix and rspamd on my VPS

I don’t get it, why don’t you install mailcow on your VPS then?

hallo_timo_97124

Hi,
Can you explain more on what configuration you did on postfix and how you connected the vps to your home server?
I’m think about the same, having postfix let be the outside and then tunnel (via wireguard) to my home server.

Thanks in advance,
Timo

Saeijou

hallo_timo_97124
For my tunnel I have an openwrt router and a VPS, those I set up like in this example:
https://protonvpn.com/support/openwrt-wireguard

For the setup, I basically asked claude.ai and it ran me through it!
My prompt was:

would it be possible to just install rspamd with postfix to handle filtering right on the vps before it reaching mailcow on my homeserver?

DocFraggle I prefer to have my configuration and data on my homeserver and not on a VPS. I also heard mailcow in it’s totality uses up quite some resources, and thus I can keep the cheapest VPS.

esackbauer My apologies if 3 Euro are not much for you, but for some it is worth the hassle.

esackbauer

I guess they want to make it as complicated as possible, while saving 3 Euro per month…

esackbauer

Saeijou but for some it is worth the hassle.

I use homelab mailcow also on my homeserver. But I do not need a VPS or VPN Tunnel.
My ISP allows port 25 incoming, but not port 25 outgoing. So I am using a DDNS service and a SMTP relay service for sending mails.

Saeijou

esackbauer I really like the benefits of security and privacy that is offered through a VPS or VPN. That is definitly worth money to me 🙂

esackbauer

How is that more secure or private?