I have several mailservers in my marshlabs
network.
In the past, all mail for @marshlabs.gaertner.de
addresses would eventually end up on host miles, a 486
box running FreeBSD-4.7. For decades, this was my main machine at
home, but never running 24/7, these days just once a week or so.
Miles gets the mail (and news) via UUCP from some
other marshlabs box running 24/7 in the DC and acting as MX. In the
last 25 years, these have been:
ohura.gaertner.de, a SunOS-4 Sparc2spog.gaertner.de, a small Linux PCsco.marshlabs.gaertner.de, an SGI Indigo R3000
running IRIX-5.3ips.marshlabs.gaertner.de, a DECsystem running
NetBSD-3.1 at that timehackett.marshlabs.gaertner.de, a VM running the
current NetBSD release.The MX would be aware of the ~30 addresses defined on miles for me, some accounts for friends, and a bunch of aliases for role accounts and small mailings lists.
The hackett mailhost is not just serving as a
forwarder of the "marshlabs" mails to miles. I also
handle all my NetBSD mailing list subscriptions on that system,
some twenty mails per day.
In the last years, I peeked into my mails while they were still
residing en-route in the uucp queue on hackett. Often,
a simple more would be good enough, but in recent
times various MIME encodings become more and more of a nuisance. In
urgent cases, I would manually inject a copy of an mail destined to
miles to my local account on hackett and
deal with it directly, hopefully not forgetting to force the
"@marshlabs.gaertner.de" sender address instead of the default
@hackett.marshlabs.gaertner.de address.
In addition, I more and more originated mails from
hackett but with the
@marshlabs.gaertner.de sender adress. Sometimes I also
used the hackett address openly for private mails to
friends where a quick turnaround was beneficial and the manual
re-routing too cumbersome.
A month ago I decided to do an experiment: deliver all mails to
neitzel@marshlabs.gaertner.de directly on
hackett. Keep on forwarding all other thirtiesh
recipient addresses to miles via UUCP.
Following some mailing lists is mostly just a reading job. Dealing with my own mails is a bit more demanding, and I had a few doubts how the switch would work out.
The MUAs are both 4.4BSD mailx(1) derivations but not the same:
Heirloom-mailx vs. NetBSD-mailx. They have slightly different
approaches to more advanced things. Also: how much would I miss
things from the miles system? All those mail boxes /
archives, and other mail-related things (GPG keys?), perhaps some
tools, would initially not be available. For example, on
miles I can at least lynx HTML mails in
the MUA -- not so on hackett. So, at the moment, I
cannot really deal with mails from PayPal or the ACM New Contents
listings. Not a huge loss, certainly not huge enough to make me
tackle the magic decoder chain.
As an experiment, this is supposed to be reversible, but after four weeks I tend to stick with it and decided to move forward.
If you find a funny section in a UNIX man-page, send it to me!
Even better: adhere to the to the fortune(1) citation style and
send it to rtfm@marshlabs.gaertner.de, like this:
$ mail rtfm@marshlabs.gaertner.de
Subject: cdrecord(1)
BUGS
Cdrecord has even more options than ls.
--cdrecord(1)
.
$
Your submission will be
If you want to be on that list yourself, just send an email at
rtfm-request@marshlabs.gaertner.de. I will manually
take care of your wishes.
You can probe the collection on the "quote-of-the-day" service:
$ telnet rtfm.marshlabs.gaertner.de qotd
Trying 2a00:1030:0:44::d90d:4185...
Connected to hackett.6.marshlabs.gaertner.de.
Escape character is '^]'.
Newfs builds a file system on the specified special file. (We often
refer to the ``special file'' as the ``disk'', although the special
file need not be a physical disk. In fact, it need not even be special.)
--newfs(8)
Connection closed by foreign host.
$
Yes. You want to have IPv6.