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]

Last N messages should work; I'll just have to do some metrics to figure out what N is. :-) (Actually, I think I can get that data from pobox.)

[siderea]

(Now, with correct formatting!)

It turns out that by day works better with standard spools. :) Righto. I think this will do what you want, but you want to test it before relying on it:

1) Make a directory called "Mail" or whathaveyou, which shall be henceforth referred to as "$MAILDIR"

2) In $MAILDIR, make a directory called "Backup".

3) In the root of your homedir (or wherever your sysadmin tells you is the place procmail will look for recipes) put the following into a file named .procmailrc:

:0 c
$MAILDIR/Backup/spool_`date +%F`

:0 i
| cd $MAILDIR/Backup && rm -rf dummy `ls -t spool_* | sed -e 1,14d`

The "1,14d" in that last line is what tells is how many days worth of spools to keep around; it's specifying 14, salt to taste. This recipe should result in a a different spool for each day, with all the day's mail going into a spool called $MAILDIR/Backup/spool_$yyyy-$mm-$dd. It keeps the last 14 of these around on a rolling basis, checking with every email that comes in.

No, I haven't tested it. :) It is based on the man page example.

[cellio]

Thanks very much! As soon as I have the backup shell account set up I'll give this a spin.