Feorlen's Other Blog

Ars Technica’s Lee Hutchinson has only posted the first installment, but this looks to be a seriously good piece on self-hosting email:

How to run your own e-mail server with your own domain, part 1

He starts off with a good dose of reality: it’s a lot of work, and when you screw it up you can make your online life really miserable really quick.

If you want to run a Linux mail server, either on your own physical server or a virtual hosted one, start reading. I’m collecting parts for my new server and I expect this to be useful even if I’m running OS X.

If you have never considered running a mail server, I’m not going to try to talk you into it. Maintaining your own for a few users is smaller in resources than a corporate server, but only somewhat smaller in complexity. You might, however, want to read how it works just to understand how email can be so broken.

I wanted to comment on this, because it’s kinda scary: someone’s personal domain was hijacked to get at his twitter account. Ars has a discussion about what happened, and the user himself did basically everything right. It was the employees of various companies (mainly his domain registrar) that facilitated the attack.

Picking up the pieces after the @N Twitter account theft

I use a personal domain for some of my email, so that hit close to home. My registrar allows me to “lock” my domain settings, basically meaning nobody can change anything until I login and unlock it. Would that have stopped something like this? I hope so. But even the best measures are not always successful at thwarting a determined attacker.

Now I’m going to get on an airplane, have fun contemplating the implications.

Once again, my mailbox got corrupted. Makes me want to hand it all over to Google and get out of the email hosting business (such as it is, with three mailboxes.) But Certain Users are objecting.

In the meantime, I have this:

Reconstructing cyrus mailboxes in Mac OS X Server 10.3 or later

I hope you never need it. I’m posting it here so I can remember where to find it.