Speaking of mail etc

[Rich Braun]

On Thu, 2003-07-24 at 15:06, Ryan L. Kitchen wrote:
>     As a noob and Lurker of BLU, I am required to ask the obvious:
> What do people who are on Blu use for their MTA and server?  I am in
> the process of setting up CYRUS IMAP and Postfix, but I am diffident.

Getting a new mail configuration set up turned out to be my new hobby for
2003.  In fact it all started on 1-Jan when I got fed up with the December
deluge of spam (spammers seem to have more free time on vacations and
weekends) and installed SpamAssassin.

I'd been using elm ever since giving up on emacs 'rmail' in the SCO/Intel 386
days.  I had three reasons for contemplating a move away from elm after almost
15 years of using it:

- It was increasingly difficult to get my email while traveling
- I needed tighter integration between the MUA and the anti-spam agent
- Correspondents were increasing their use of html and attachments

What I liked about elm (or emacs) in the old days was I could telnet into the
system from anywhere and get my mail easily.  In the era of ssh and the
ongoing treadmill of reinstalling practically every app on your system every 6
months in response to CERT security advisories, I found there was no guarantee
that I'd have access to a compatible ssh client.

OK, so skipping past months of downloading, compiling, learning PHP, writing
my own code, and otherwise sucking up all available free time, here's what I
have now:

- Squirrelmail 1.4 (there is a new version 1.4.1 out but no compelling reason
to upgrade if you're already on 1.4)
- Openssl 0.9.7a
- Apache 1.3.27 (yet another CERT advisory came out this week, gotta migrate
to 1.3.28)
- UW imap 2002b
- PHP 4.3.1 (I think I'm about 2 revs out of date on that one)
- SpamAssassin 2.55, along with razor 2.34, dcc 1.1.36, and pyzor 0.4
- MySQL 4.0.12

The coding that I've done has mainly been to add a whole new address book (I
got tired of using Outlook, wanted to have secure access from anywhere) and to
improve the integration between SpamAssassin and the mail client. 
Squirrelmail is a really nice user agent, particularly if you've been
accustomed to pine or elm; hacking its source code is another story.  The
author is in the midst of a rewrite so at some point I'm going to have to
scrap my mods and re-do my customizations.  Perhaps I could contribute to the
freeware development project, but I'm a bit skittish about that because
implementing freeware is basically a thankless zero-paying job (everyone
clamors for tech support for 10 years after you publish something).

One thing Squirrelmail currently lacks, and which I'm increasingly wanting to
add, is a reasonably smart html (rich-text format) editor.  Someone published
one that really & truly sucks:  it only works with Microsoft browsers, and it
posts *only* the html version, not dual html/text attachments like Outlook or
any other html mailer I've seen.  But I found a newer version of the textarea
editor that works with Mozilla, and have been tinkering with that.  Required
coding to make do what I want is primarily in two areas:  getting it to
generate a 'multipart/alternative' MIME message with 80-column text output,
and tying it into the MySQL database so I can create per-correspondent rules. 
You really need the latter if you're a frequent contributor to mailing lists,
which frown on html submissions.

Some purists say text-only email is the only "right" way.  I vehemently
disagree with that, based on an experience dating back to 1990.  The company
where I worked at the time adopted cc:Mail and gradually distributed it across
the branch offices.  At first hardly anyone used it, but once it took off, the
company-culture was transformed in a way that consolidated its #1 industry
position (it's still a high-flyer in the top-10 list of Massachusetts stocks).
 One aspect that I saw used *constantly* was use of highlighting (colors and
bold) to keep track of quotations or to help make a point.  Internet email
doesn't generally have that, but a lot of message-boards do.  I think html is
the standard way to implement rich-text format messages, and I think few users
will be able to resist the trend.  Five years from now, plain-text email will
probably be a fading thing.  One implication of that is that mailing list
software such as what we're using to correspond here will have to have smarter
html parsing.

The bottom line for me is that I can now connect to my home mail server using
any browser (version 4 on up, perhaps even older, so long as it has https),
log in and review new or old mail using the same file/directory layout I've
been using for ages.  The messages are kept in plain-text (Unix mailbox)
format so I can still grep for any text I want.  (The mailer has a search
function but like with virtually all mailers, it's clunky and I find it vastly
easier and quicker to just grep the whole directory hierarchy.)  Over 2000
spam messages per month are sent to the bit-bucket without my having to think
about or review them, with confidence that as soon as I add anyone to my
address book, their messages will be kept out of the bit-bucket.

-rich