email identity crisis averted :-)

[Peter R. Wood (Lists)]

Hi all,

Thanks for your suggestions on resolving my email identity crisis. A lot of
good ideas and food for thought. Here's the solution that I have chosen for
the time being. I'll try it out for a while and hopefully I will settle down
with it. :-)

* I will continue to maintain a separate address that collects all of my
mailing lists. This resides on my home linux box. The account uses a dynamic
procmail mailing list filter which automatically determines the mailing list
a message belongs to based on its headers, and puts it in the right box. It
will also create a new mailbox if it receives email from a list for which no
box exists. This saves  me the trouble of having to set up new boxes and
rules for mailing lists as I join them. :-) You can check the recipes out
here if you don't already have such a thing set up:
http://dotfiles.com/files/12/215_.procmailrc This recipe also contains a
'voice announcement' feature similar to what R. Peterson just mentioned.

* All other accounts that are able to forward mail, will forward to my
'main' email account which is on a vhosting box at flighthost.com.

* This 'main' account keeps a copy of every message received, but also
forwards it on to a 'mirror' account on my home linux box.  If at some point
ATT/Mediaone blocks access to SMTP on my box, I can easily switch over to
using fetchmail to pull the messages from my end.  In addition, keeping the
copies on the server adds extra safety, as Flighthost performs regular
backups and has all sorts of other redundancies built in.

* I run an imapd on my linux box at home.

* For checking mail at home, I set MacOS X's Mail.app up to access both my
'lists' and 'main' boxes on my linux box via IMAP.

* For checking my personal mail from work, where I must use Windows, I use
SecureCRT to set up ssh tunnels to port 25 and 143 on my home linux box
(these outgoing ports are blocked at work). I use Outlook Express to access
my IMAP folders for both my 'lists' and 'main' email accounts and mail is
sent through my home box by way of the tunnel to port 25.

* As for checking email on the road, I don't have a good solution set up as
of yet. I do have a basic webmail setup on the vhosting server for my
domain, but it's just barely usable. Since I run a web server off my home
box, I'm planning on setting up my own webmail service that will use IMAP. I
have looked at a few webmail clients and I think this should be no problem
to set up.  If ssh is available on a system, obviously I can use that to ssh
in to my box and read mail in Linux with mutt or pine.

Again, thanks for all the suggestions!

Peter

--
Peter R. Wood (Lists) - lists at woburn.dyndns.org - http://prwdot.org/