Rage Against the Mail Sheen

[flwyd]

Linux system administration has gotten a lot easier since I was first introduced ten years ago. However, it just took me the last three hours to...

• Determine what I needed to do for secure IMAP and set it up (easy)
• Find out how to implement pop-before-smtp (fairly straight forward)
• Attempt to yum install pop-before-smtp
• Realize perl module dependencies were missing
• CPAN install missing modules
• Ponder why yum didn't count that as meeting the dependencies
• Determine that my yum distros lacked the necessary modules
• Find a repo with said modules
• yum install pop-before-smtp
• Configure the same
• Download popauth.m4 sendmail hack and configure sendmail
• Configure imap server to log properly
• Try several times to send mail
• Download alternate popauth.m4 hack
• Reload sendmail
• Breathe a sigh of relief as I received 14 messages in my test recipient box.

I'm still not entirely happy with my mail situation for a number of reasons.

• My previously preferred mail client, MH, has technical limitations, so I'm Trying New Things
• Mail.app only runs on MacOS X, and hence only at home
• I'm not very keen on reading my personal email with my work program (Evolution)
• The stable mutt doesn't have a convenient folder list
• Beta mutt folder list doesn't seem to work
• I have grand designs for a MUA I'd prefer, but
• My programming energies that could implement said MUA are expended at work
• And yet I still save all my spam, with the plan to write my own spam filter

So there.

(I could link all of those programs and instructions, but I'm tired and grumpy. I trust your web searching skills on those.)