Doing It Yourself was Re: "safety" of gmail (was: Re: [clue-tech] Archives)

[Roy J. Tellason]

On Friday 28 April 2006 01:48 am, Nate Duehr wrote:
> Collins Richey wrote:
> > Actually, as it turns out, I have a fair number of the mails going
> > back to 09/05/04. All of these are in my gmail account, so I would
> > need to figure out how to get them into an mbox file. I know that
> > gmail has a pop3 retrieval function, but the only active mail account
> > that I have is my wife's account on comcast. There's no hurry with my
> > contribution, since the mails are safe on gmail.
>
> This will probably start a side-thread, so I'll change the topic but
> reply to the thread...

As will I...

> What makes you think gmail is "safe"?
>
> There was some interesting publicity recently about some poor guy that
> had his account accidentally deleted.  Google's official reply was,
> "Sorry, gmail is still in Beta!  See ya!"  He had what he described as
> "very important" e-mails in his gmail account.
>
> Many of us do, I'm sure.
>
> Seriously -- gmail's a nifty tool, but saying that your important mail
> or data in someone else's hands is "safe" without a contract stating how
> they're going to back it up and how fast they will recover it... isn't a
> good habit to get into.
>
> I keep toying with the idea of dropping running my own servers -- and
> just using my ISP or public resources like Google's.  My servers are a
> bit of a pain most days... (read: spam filters) but... they're mine.
>
> And I know what the backup schedule is... and I know where the backups
> are... and my ISP doesn't have any legal requirements to keep all my
> e-mail for a set period of time after I delete it (that's coming...)...
> and... I dunno.  I guess I like that, for the time being.
>
> Plus nowadays it feels so "old-school" to run your own stuff, but I'd
> also miss my customized IMAP server that I've had set up for years,
> which most ISP's still don't really do... being able to fire up a copy
> of Thunderbird or mutt on ANY machine and have all my mail for the last
> X number of years available to me is... nice.

Must be nice...    :-)

I got going with linux here a while back (1999),  and at that time didn't have 
any 'net access,  but was still pretty active in fidonet,  and still had that 
going up until last October or thereabouts when things just stopped working 
and I lost my feed,  etc.  Plust the BBS was getting single-digit number of 
callers per week,  so it hardly seemed worth the effort to get it going 
again.

Got X working after some effort,  and that was nifty.  (No,  I didn't happen 
to install one of those distros that comes up in a GUI install,  etc. -- I 
run a lot of older hardware here and that stuff doesn't do too well in that 
situation.  :-)  So a while after that,  I finally decide that 'net access is 
worth the $14.95 a month even though I was unemployed (and still am),  and 
here I've been ever since.

The first and easiest thing after getting ppp going (again the hard way) was a 
browser,  that worked right off once I was connected.  Email was another 
story.  I looked at the idea of having to mess with a whole mess of different 
programs,  sendmail, fetchmail, procmail,  and so forth.  I *still* don't 
have a clear picture of how all of that stuff should hang together in my 
mind,  and now it's a couple of years later.  The whole process of mail was 
looking to be a much bigger hassle than I'd thought it was going to be in my 
studying of it in books,  etc.,  and then I short-circuited all of that 
really quickly,  when I started using kmail.

The one thing that I'm doing differently than I was doing before is leaving 
all of the files on my "server" (I put it in quotes because it's only a 
K6-200 for now :-).  These are getting exported by way of nfs.  Which is a 
part of the problem,  because there are many times when things just bog down, 
I see both the HD light on that box and the light on my hub staying on pretty 
solid...   If there's a better way to do that part,  I'd like to hear about 
it.  Yeah,  I could leave it on the same box as I'm working from (the 
"workstation") but did it that way so that I could log on to any machine on 
the LAN and do mail.

It's been suggested to me in other contexts that perhaps I might want to run 
an IMAP server here?  I'm not sure if that would be the case,  why I'd want 
to,  and what exactly I'd have to do to get that (or any of the rest of that 
mail stuff going here).

The setup here right now is one firewall/router box,  one server,  and one 
workstation,  with one w98 box that uses the LAN to get to the 'net,  which 
is nice because I don't have to worry about most of the crap that would hit 
that one.  That last box is due to be upgraded to a dual-boot system which 
will also be a workstation when it's done,  and I may add some others before 
all is said and done.  And perhaps another server box or two,  I have one in 
process that's going to have some RAID 5 arrays in it...

So if you guys have any suggestions as to how I might better this setup with 
regards to mail,  I'd sure be interested in hearing about it.

-- 
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space,  a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed.  --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James 
M Dakin