[OpenIndiana-discuss] The mailing list is dead

[Richard L. Hamilton]

> On Dec 17, 2015, at 15:22, David Brodbeck <brodbd at uw.edu> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 1:21 AM, Nikola M <minikola at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> I recently figured that Gmail through it's web interface forbids sending
>> any type of archive within the mail messages (.zip, .7z, .rar etc) and that
>> level of user-bashing combined with mandatory indexing of message contents
>> and lack of privacy, hardly comes in hand with company requirements.
>> 
> 
> Heh, here they stopped allowing that here even before they outsourced.  Too
> many viruses were getting spread around via ZIP files that people would
> blindly click on.  It's not true that you can't send them through Gmail,
> though.  I just tried one and it worked. Maybe the site you were sending it
> to rejected it?
> 
> Many (most?) email providers also now reject mail sent from cable and DSL
> IP blocks, due to spam problems.  That was another reason I stopped hosting
> my own.

My sendmail is recompiled to support authentication, etc; and forwards to an ISP's submission port with authentication (bypassing the cable ISP's block on port 25 outgoing (and sadly incoming, too)).  Note: I'm disappointed that even in Solaris 11, it doesn't seem that authentication support was configured into the stock sendmail.  And yeah, postfix is cooler and allegedly more secure, but IMO sendmail remains the king of flexible function, and with the O'Reilly books already in hand, it's not that bad to configure.

A cron job runs fetchmail periodically to download mail.

So one can have something approaching normal self-hosted email functionality, despite ISP games.  There's the 5 minute delay for the cron job to run, but no more than that.  My Mac email client also watches the staging inbox on the other end, so I can read something before it's downloaded if I can't wait 5 minutes.

It all works fairly well, save that my IMAP server is the old UW one, which is very inefficient - doesn't scale to large mailboxes; I'd chosen it ages ago for compatibility with existing Solaris local mailboxes.  I'm on my way to setting up dovecot and squirrelmail in an LDOM on my T5240, but I really don't look forward to migrating a few gigs of mail scattered across hundreds of mailboxes (including saved Usenet posts by group, etc).  The space is not major (even though the LDOMs don't have that much space using the existing internal drives), but shutting it all down while I copy and convert mailbox formats...yuck.  So for now, I have to keep the inbox and a couple of other very active ones down to small sizes, while this still runs with inefficient software on a Sun Blade 100. :-)