iPhone Push-EMail with your own Mailserver (Exim, Postfix, QMail, etc…)

As Jabber does not seem appropriate for a SMS-replacement (the clients just don’t to survive connection changes from wifi->3g, 3g->E, etc.) i’ve been looking for something different. E-Mail is nice, just the shortest polling-interval of 15minutes is not suited for realtime communication. So – theres Push Email (meaning the iPhone will hold a HTTP connection to some server open all the time and the server writes something to that stream as soon as a new mail arrives) for various services including Microsoft Exchange and GMail. How about you hosting a own server since you don’t want to give away all your data? No problem – either use one of the tons of commercial servers supporting Push or use Z-Push with your favorite IMAP and SMTP server.

Z-Push is a collection of PHP Scripts that emulate a Microsoft Exchange AS Server to provide push. It supports multiple backends – IMAP among them.

One drawback of Z-Push is that it does so strange PHP magic it doesn’t support PHP-CGI on apache, it wants mod_php really really bad. But mod_php is bad for security. So for testing purposes i’ve set up Z-Push on my homeserver instead of my dedicated server which runs php-cgi. Problem: Z-Push will run on a different domain and machine than the mailserver runs on. This produces quite some headache – here’s how you solve it:

  1. normally install Z-Push (simply unpack the tarball and install according to INSTALL) on your “small server”. Edit config.php to reflect your timezone settings, change the BACKEND_PROVIDER to “BackendIMAP”, enter your server data (you may want /ssl/[no]validate-cert in IMAP_OPTIONS). Also set IMAP_DEFAULTFROM to “@yourdomain.com” – important :).
  2. Configure your “small servers” MTA to relay via your “big server”. As i don’t want a pseudo-open relay on my “big server” i chose to use exims SMARTHOST with SMTP Login method:
  3. (I’m assuming Debian here) install exim4 or start dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config. Configure your box to be a smarthost with remote smtp. Then open up “/etc/exim4/passwd.client" and add a line with the syntax "host:user:password" to reflect your "big servers" smtp account.
  4. As this is a normal smtp connection and no relay, no changes must be made to your big server.
  5. Thats it, enter the data as Microsoft Exchange Account on your iPhone, valdidation will fail. Press Next and Save anyways, navigate to Account Details, turn of SSL.
  6. Now your Push-Email account works!

Tipp: if you need debug output from Z-Push create a file called debug.txt in its Install-Dir and chmod it a+rw.

Well, this is IMO a quite nice way to get PushMail as a SMS-Substitute for the iPhone (given all your friends have Smartphones with Internet and use your Push solution too :P). Have fun!

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