I’ve been on the Internet a long time.
> ;$network.MOO_Name
=> "LambdaMOO"
[used 2 ticks, 0 seconds.]
> @age me
Quad first connected on Tue Oct 31 17:07:28 1995 PST
Which makes us 12 years, 5 months, and 10 days old.
However, for official purposes our age is 12 years, 3 months, and 27 days.
And, in that time, I have accumulated a few e-mail addresses. I’m proud to say that, with a few exceptions due to legal complications, every one of them still reaches me. But, this means I invest quite a bit of effort into my infrastructure.
I have a VPS running Postfix / Fetchmail + Procmail + SpamAssassin + Dovecot. I use mutt and (increasingly) Thunderbird to read and write. It’s a well oiled machine pushing a 6 gigabyte spool.
How Stuff Gets In
The Postfix configuration is bog standard. megan.quadhome.com is the authoritative name for the server. My domains are all virtually aliased to UNIX accounts.
For relaying my mail, the settings are straight-forward. No relaying without authentication. No authentication without TLS.
For the addresses whose domains I don’t directly control, that’s where Fetchmail steps in. I have a .fetchmailrc listing my accumulated servers, accounts and passwords. A crontab entry on @reboot starts the daemon.
How Stuff Gets Munged
I used to use virtual addresses. scott_BLAH@scott.tranzoa.net for anything sketchy. But, I found the effort made no difference in my inbox.
Now, when an e-mail comes in, it goes through a Procmail filter that separates mailing list traffic into their own dedicated boxes. After that, everything remaining is fed into SpamAssassin. I use spamc / spamd with bayes_learn_journal enabled to keep things fast.
As incredible as it sounds, occasionally SpamAssassin is wrong. Two folders named “Ham” and “Spam” exist for those situations. I appropriately file the miscategorized mail and the following script ran @hourly solves the problem:
#!/bin/sh
#
# learn-mbox
#
# An fancy wrapper around SpamAssassin's sa-learn.
#
# Learn an mailbox and then delete it.
#
# Lock to ensure we don't clobber anything.
#
MBOX="$1"
MODE="$2"
if [ -z "$MBOX" ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 [MAILBOX] [ham | spam]" >&2
exit 1
elif [ ! -f "$MBOX" ]; then
echo "$0: '$MBOX' does not exist." >&2
exit 1
elif [ ! -s "$MBOX" ]; then
# echo "$0: '$MBOX' is empty." >&2
exit 1
fi
if [[ "$MODE" != "ham" && "$MODE" != "spam" ]]; then
echo "$0: '$MODE' is not a learning mode. ('ham' or 'spam')" >&2
exit 2
fi
lockfile-create $MBOX
lockfile-touch $MBOX &
sa-learn --mbox --$MODE $MBOX > /dev/null
echo -n > $MBOX
kill %1
lockfile-remove $MBOX
How Stuff Gets To Me
No Hotmail, Eudora, or Squirrelmail for me. I used Pine for the first years of my online life. After the licensing dispute, I switched to mutt and never looked back. It had all the features I needed.
Time marched on, and different features became more important.
Now, I use a combination of Thunderbird and mutt. The former provides a richer experience. The latter is a safety net for when I’m on random computers.
mutt is on the server, so it accesses my mail directly. But, Thunderbird is an IMAP client. And, Dovecot provides those necessary IMAP services.
Dovecot is also configured with out-of-box defaults with one exception. My IMAP passwords are different from my UNIX passwords. Dovecot provides TLS-only SASL authentication with hashed passwords. Postfix also works with Dovecot to share the same authentication method.
The practical upside is when Mallory finds my mail passwords, she can’t destroy my server and backups.
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