The Satyavolu Family Website

Configuring Gmail as SMTP Relay on Elastix

Elastix uses Postfix, and getting Postfix configured to use Gmail as a SMTP Relay has been incredibly painful to do. This should not be as difficult as it turned out to be, but here is what I had to do to get things working.

Edit the /etc/postfix/main.cf file

nano /etc/postfix/main.cf

Change these lines to your external domain and the name of your elastix server:

################################
#Ingresado por yb-webadmin
mydomain = myrealdomain.gotdns.org
myhostname = elastix.myrealdomain.gotdns.org

Change the following line

#relayhost = [an.ip.add.ress]

to

relayhost = [smtp.gmail.com]:587

Create a new file /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd and put the following line in it

[smtp.gmail.com]:587       loginname@gmail.com:password

Then run the following command

postmap hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd

Create a directory /etc/postfix/certs. Generate a self-signed certificate as follows

cd /etc/postfix/certs
openssl req -new -x509 -keyout cakey.pem -out cacert.pem -days 365
openssl genrsa -out gm.key 1024
openssl req -new -key gm.key -out gm.csr
openssl ca -cert cacert.pem -keyfile cakey.pem -out ./gm.pem -infiles gm.csr

If you get an error that says something like

Could not open directory ../../CA/newcerts

then do the following before you run the commands above

mkdir -p ../../CA/newcerts
touch ../../CA/index.txt
echo "01" >> ../../CA/serial

and after you are done, you can remove the above directory using

rm -rf ../../CA

Add the following lines to /etc/postfix/main.cf

smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
smtp_sasl_security_options =
 
smtp_use_tls = yes
smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
smtp_sasl_tls_security_options = noanonymous
smtp_tls_note_starttls_offer = yes
tls_random_source = dev:/dev/urandom
smtp_tls_scert_verifydepth = 5
smtp_tls_key_file=/etc/postfix/certs/gm.key
smtp_tls_cert_file=/etc/postfix/certs/gm.pem
smtpd_tls_ask_ccert = yes
smtpd_tls_req_ccert =no
smtp_tls_enforce_peername = no

And finally run

postfix reload

Check your setup by sending a test email

mail myself@myemail.com

And check the logs for anything going wrong

tail -f /var/log/maillog

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 12th, 2009 at 3:33 pm and is filed under Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses Subscribe to comments


  1. Victor Casale

    Can you please help me?

    When i type
    echo “01″ >> ../../CA/serial

    I get the following message:
    bash: syntax error near unexpected token `&’

    I’m i doing something wrong?

    Thank you

    Jun 20, 2009 @ 7:06 pm


  2. Chris

    I just wanted to sincerely thank you for publishing your findings — I feel confident that, without your help, I would not have figured this out on my own!

    Just wanted to let you know that I got this to work with one modification:

    Instead of using this command:

    echo “01″ >> ../../CA/serial

    I used:

    echo “01″ > ../../CA/serial

    And now everything is working.

    Quick question. Do you know how in postfix to specify the name of the relay sender. Right now it is coming from root and I’d like it to come from a different name than root.

    Thanks, once again, for publishing your hard work!

    Chris

    Jun 23, 2009 @ 5:35 pm

Reply