[OpenIndiana-discuss] The mailing list is dead

[Jonathan Adams]

On 18 December 2015 at 01:40, Richard L. Hamilton <rlhamil at smart.net> wrote:

>
> > On Dec 17, 2015, at 15:22, David Brodbeck <brodbd at uw.edu> wrote:
>
> <snip/>


> 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.
>

I remember the days when I used to do that ... not nice.


> 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. :-)
>
> I have a script (unfortunately it's perl) that does a reasonable job of
converting old Solaris Mail folders to Maildir format, and a "procmail"
script that I use as the "local mail delivery agent" for sendmail that
stores new email as Maildir ...

As a company we kept 2 mail servers going at each site (that had more than
10 people) whilst we converted the people one at a time, and it's time
consuming.  On a positive note, now that the server doesn't need to open
the entire mail folder into memory, and the indexes are stored on disk, the
memory footprint of dovecot is almost as small as the old Solaris POP3
server, and the speed of access for a new client is almost instant (no need
for the client to rebuild it's own index, which used to kill the server and
all other connected IMAP clients!)

do you know how much data you have in total, how much down time you can
afford?

Jon