Re: [exim] How to have port 80 open, along with a website?

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Author: Bernd Jendrissek
Date:  
To: chuckee
CC: exim-users
Subject: Re: [exim] How to have port 80 open, along with a website?

chuckee wrote:
> I want to have Exim open on port 80 on my server (say, myserver.com),
> however I also have a website that needs to be visible (on port 80), at
> least on www.myserver.com and also myserver.com if possible.
>

As others have explained, having both HTTP and SMTP served from the same
address:port endpoint are irreconcileable goals. Maybe you could make
some headway with timeouts waiting for HTTP requests, but that too is a
losing game. Compound a random failure rate by a large enough number of
sessions and things will get weird.

That said, the failure mode (prematurely sending the SMTP banner to an
HTTP client connection) explicitly breaks HTTP, but not SMTP. (If the
SMTP banner never arrives it looks like just an unresponsive SMTP
server. Costs you some irritability points but no weird "Firefox has
canceled the request for your protection" messages.)
> I need Exim open on port 80 because many of my users are accessing Exim from
> networks where port 80 is the only port that is open (e.g. airports).
>

How about port 443 - is that closed too? Could you run sslwrap on port
443, decrypting and then forwarding connections to localhost:25? Yes,
you'd have to get your mail clients to connect with SSL
unconditionally. I *think* that's what smtp.gmail.com wants you to do.