Blogging has been lighter than air; but I have blogged a few things which were important (at least to me). I’ve been working on some issues with Mozilla Thunderbird of late which makes it almost unusable here for any serious email. The scenario is wanting to move all my email to a Linux box that I own, one that is completely unreachable by normal means, and then doing super secure email over it. This can all be done easily with no MX record, no outward facing mail server, and no real risk. How I did it was to get openvpn and dovecot working. Neither is terribly difficult since both are apt-gettable from debian official sources. With openvpn, create some SSL certs or for me a static key works fine since don’t have some population of users vpn’ing in. Dovecot is easy too with a simple apt-get operation. If you are running postfix, you’ll have to make a few changes to your /etc/postfix/main.cf file to make it do Maildir. Why switch to Maildir you may ask? Well, I think mailbox performance is better even for a single user and its a thing to do. You see… I still like learning this stuff. So I installed mb2md and moved all my mbox folders to maildir style folders. Then I edited my /etc/postfx/main.cf and told postfix to use maildir and procmail local delivery.
So now at home I have a fancy IMAP server which is fed by fetchmail from two mail servers out there. I have my reasons for this; but most of them are around wanting to protect and secure the mail I send out. So now, I fetchmail the mail to dovecot and have both accounts in a single user account on my linux mail server.
If I am off somewhere, I can openvpn in and do mail very easily. I can also use squirrelmail or just ssh in from my laptop and use the venerable but ultra-cool terminal mail program mutt. This all works exceedingly well for me traveling, at home, etc. I can have the best of worlds and have a super dee dooper secure mail environment reachable only by vpn or ssh with RSA keys only.
Enter Thunderbird… Now for some reason Thunderbird does not like to actually operate nicely with this setup. It tends to time out putting mail in my Sent mail folder almost 5 times out of every 10; or 50% of the time. Blech. That does not make one productive or even happy. So then I moved to Sylpheed which is lighter, faster, and more flexible. It does not have the so-called “mozilla” flash; but it also does not do the timeout thing all the time or at least 50% of the time 
.
I’ve reduced this down to some bad thing between dovecot and thunderbird and there are open bugs on Debian’s BTS for this. Such is life. But having choice means I can move on to other mail clients. Consider that done.
The main factor here is the ease in building a totally private email server that has no dependency on DNS or other facts, making it available when you need it, and then protecting it. Openvpn makes a great choice for this kind of access since it rus on the BSDs, Linux, Windows. On Windows, it lets me click on network places and see places. I’m not sure how that works with samba; but it does. Kudos!
I was asked before whether blogging would pick up again after the summer heat wave. I don’t know. The temps are not making it conducive but I feel on the weekends that its time to write more inane garbage so perhaps I’ll just copy it to this place.
