Charles and Christy’s Weblog

Like many people in the information age, I have a sick proliferation of email accounts for various purposes.

This summer has been especially bad, as I have 6 accounts that I need to check on a regular basis. This becomes cunmbersome, especially since Hotmail and Yahoo don’t allow you to forward (at least not for free.)

Along comes Mr. Postman - a little Java application that will POP-ify your Hotmail or Yahoo accounts.

With this brilliant little invention, I can now monitor all my accounts using a single client. Currently Thunderbird is my light-lifting client of choice.

Ack! When will someone create an MTA that is safe for public consumption?

I’m tired of screwing around with figuring out how to route mails through ISP servers, so I wanted to set up my own email server.

Sendmail is of course installed everywhere. But if you’ve ever peeked at a sendmail.cf file, you’d notice that it makes perl read like a children’s book. “Oh, there’s a mailer config file and a master config file. But don’t look at those. Instead create the master config file by navigating a complicated network of .mc files and running the m4 program to make your config file.” Huh? What are the actual options?

(When the explanation page is several miles long, I know I’m in for trouble.)

Qmail seems to be the next best alternative. And since I’ve had excellent experiences with tinydns, also written by D. J. Bernstein, I started digging into it.

After identifying the major MTA contenders (not that I’m totally clear on what an MTA does yet), any introduction to email servers, already gets messy. It starts getting into MTAs, MUAs, queues, SMTP, POP, IMAP, mail, biff, Cyrus, fetchmail, procmail, LDAP, Usenet, notifiers, mbx format, mbox format, mailbox format, UUCP, serial cables, and typing raw commands on telnet all at the same time.

It’s not long before I begin to think that the “killer app” of the internet is boxes and boxes of punch card trickery sitting on the desk of some gray-bearded guy whose greatest claim to fame was writing some f-ed up editor in the 70’s that’s complicated beyond belief. Oh wait….

Dammit, just get me to the install instructions. Surely someone’s written the quick-n-dirty way to simply route some stupid emails from inside a private network and not host your own email address space, right? Wrong. I start going through Qmail’s install docs and it’s about 80,000 steps, each with their own little script I’m supposed to write, or copy, and adjust by hand, and place in the appropriate spot in my system, and configure with a wacky startup monitor, and ….

I’ll let you know if I ever figure it out. Or maybe Gmail will solve all.