[OpenIndiana-discuss] The mailing list is dead

[Richard L. Hamilton]

> On Dec 18, 2015, at 04:30, Jonathan Adams <t12nslookup at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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

Oh, it's just my stuff, and I'm retired.  Assuming no trips planned, it could stay down as long as need be.  It's just going to be a PITA to make something that sort of works (if reaching the limits of scale) into something that works better. :-)