LJ and mail problems

[cellio]

Apparently I'm one of the lucky folks on the MadCow cluster, the one that was broken more badly than all the others. Oh joy. Glad it's back up earlier than predicted, anyway.

To add insult to injury (well, injury to insult is more like it), my mail provider seems to have stopped receiving incoming mail several hours into Shabbat. After Shabbat, when I discovered the problem, I set up pobox.com to mirror to a second address, but I'm missing the mail that arrived up to that point. I hope it's in a queue somewhere and not gone forever. I also hope they respond to my report soon; while I realize it's Sunday, it's been (at this writing) 16 hours since I made the report and well more than 30 hours since the failure occurred.

A service that I would really like to have, but lack the technical skills to implement myself, is an inbox buffer. The problem with mirroring the pobox redirection to the mailbox that comes with my DSL is that if I don't remember to clean it out periodically, it fills up and starts bouncing. I could use gmail on the theory that a gig is forever, but the vast majority of my mail is spam and I don't want it getting in the way of my real mail if I actually want to use that service for searching. So what I'd really like to have is an email address that receives mail and automatically deletes it a week later; that gives me a backup that I can check if for any reason my primary email is unavailable, but it runs on auto-pilot the rest of the time.

Vaguely on the subject of mail, I got (physical) mail this week from the ACLU telling me it's time to renew my membership. Just one problem: I'm not a member of the ACLU. I really expected better behavior out of folks who claim to be fighting the good fight. Deceptive marketing practices do not endear them to me.

Comments

[cellio]

The ISP I use, nyip.net, has a $54/year model that will do you, I think. It has only 350MB space; would that be an adequately large buffer?

Thanks for the tip. 350MB should do the trick; it's certainly a multi-day buffer, so if that turns out to be 5 or 6 instead of 7 that's still ok. If my friend (to whom I've just sent email) can't sell me an address for less, I'll sign up with them.

Thanks very much for the procmail-wrangling! I currently use a very very simple procmailrc, because I don't really know what I'm doing. (Mail from one high-volume mailing list goes into its own folder, anything with a SpamAssassin score of 5 or more goes into its own folder, and the rest goes to the inbox.)

What format mailbox would you like your mail stored in in your backup system? Are you familiar with the Unix flavors of mail box?

The answer to the second question is "no", and thus the answer to the first one is "I have insufficient clues to answer that". What are the relevant factors?

The inbox for my current primary mailbox is a text file in /var/mail; I don't see any special sequences at the beginning of it, but if you tell me what to look for I could try to figure out what it is. Pine knows how to parse it, and that's been good enough for me. :-)

[siderea]

The answer to the second question is "no", and thus the answer to the first one is "I have insufficient clues to answer that". What are the relevant factors?


The inbox for my current primary mailbox is a text file in /var/mail; I don't see any special sequences at the beginning of it, but if you tell me what to look for I could try to figure out what it is. Pine knows how to parse it, and that's been good enough for me. :-)

Ah, you want a standard spool. No problem. If you have a file with some other name, you can get pine to read it? Or get it to where pine can read it?

[cellio]

The pinerc file has a parameter for specifying where the inbox is if it's non-standard, so the name/location of the file shouldn't matter.