The author of this quick tutorial was faced with the need for a
secure mail relay that would get him around Earthlink’s poor status
with many of the more agressive spam blockers. His solution was
creating a secure tunnel for SMTP from his laptop at home to a mail
server that didn’t enjoy outlaw status.
An easy way to do so would have been to allow relay for
earthlink.net through the machine I was going to use as my relay.
This would have been bad, and as a result was an unacceptable
option. You’d have to be a serious cracksmoker to open up a machine
to relay for Earthlink. Spammers would sniff it out fairly quickly,
and proceed to hammer it. To get around this, I decided to set up
an SSH tunnel from a port on my laptop to port 25 on the mail
server. It was a fairly easy task, and well worth it in the long
run. The remainder of this article will explain how I set things
up.