[COLUG] Mail server advice

[Rick Troth]

Thanks for sharing how you went Google, Scott.

> I know a few Google employees, and I believe that they're working hard
> to make technology do new cool and useful things.  I believe that
> they're not interested in -- or supportive of -- working for a company
> that would exploit its user base.  I might be wrong, but for now I've
> seen nothing to make me uncomfortable using Google's services.

I have learned that the nature and direction of the company
can change, even very quickly.

Richard mentioned IMAP.  Dunno when I first heard about it,
but the ability to IMAP into their service sets Google Mail apart
from the other freebies.  (And it's something you would expect
no doubt knowning some of their employees.)  So what I did was ...

I forward selected mailboxes to GMail.
Tried making it so that GMail could handle all mail for a sub-domain,
but could not get that to work.  (And there would still have been
some forwarding.)  We're talking simplistic $HOME/.forward
where I didn't even mess with /etc/aliases.

I then use 'fetchmail' to yank it back from Google to the home network.
Had been using that already to pull mail from the "external" servers
to the main mail server behind my firewall.  I fully expect someday to
have to back away from GMail.  When that day comes, I'll cut the forward
and run "one last fetch" and say bye-bye.  But the Google guys knew that
for paranoids like me to play, they would have to open it up.
(And now they're slurping up my data, meta or otherwise.)

For confidentiality, if "we" send mail among ourselves,
it stays inside.  I doubt my kids are really conscious of this aspect,
but my wife asks about it occasionally.  She understands that the
global email fabric is terribly un-secured.

I think it was Tom's original question ... what to use?
For MTA I use Postfix on the inside servers and some of the
edge servers.  The main external server is a rented FreeBSD jail
and at the time I acquired it, Postfix had a bug that was exposed
by the jail.  So I am stuck using SENDMAIL on that one.  And while I
WELCOME THE VARIETY, I find Postfix a little easier to build and to
configure.  But thankfully, it follows SENDMAIL enough in things
like /etc/aliases that I get some commonality between them.

Of course, the other code is 'fetchmail' and 'imapd'.
I forget which 'imapd' we are running.  Probably stock SuSE.

-- R;   <><

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