If you search for setting up an email server on Google, you’ll find thousands of hits. Few of these actually tell you how to setup your local server to send and receive email directly, instead you’ll find an abundance of guides on how to relay Postfix and Exim. Of course this presents quite a problem if what you want to is read a guide on setting up email to be sent from your server. I bring up this example specifically because that’s what I spent the past three day weekend trying to do - muddle out how to setup an email server.

I finally have begun to suspect that the problem I truly face is that I need to relay my email because my ISP blocks port 25, and I can accept that despite the fact that I would have liked to learn how to setup said email server. My main problem was that to find a full how-to an the subject (rather than the skimpy ones on the Ubuntu wiki), which also needed to be up-to-date, I had to search through so many results.

Nor was email the only guide which I had trouble finding. I found myself unable to find a complete tutorial for setting up an mdadm software array. I finally managed to cobble together a successful solution, but it took around three different guides to figure out how. (My own guide is written, I just need to move it onto Drupal).

Is this an problem that others have faced, or is it simply a problem with my method of searching for these guides? Comments welcome.