I have been renovating our old house 
(1920s? 1930s? I don't know, but it 
originally had knob and tube wiring) 
for 13 years. I'm on the last room. 
The electrical, drywall, painting, and 
flooring are all done. Just the 
moldings are left to put in. It's been 
a long process and it will be so nice 
to be finished. I don't think I'd ever 
advise anyone to buy an old house 
unless they wanted to learn a lot and 
experience their fair share of fear 
and panic in the process.

Have you ever had a bizarre idea that 
turned out to be really useful? I just 
did. I wanted to set up a private 
email server, with no 'federation'. 
The users would only be able to send 
and receive emails on that server. 
Part of the purpose was to use it with 
Delta Chat.

Well, I started experimenting. First I 
set up email for local accounts using 
opensmtpd (thanks for the 
recommendation KatolaZ), so that users 
who could SSH into the server could 
email one another. Then I added IMAP 
with dovecot and altered the opensmtpd 
config to allow external access. At 
this point, I hadn't set up TLS. It 
was the equivalent of a 1997 mail 
server, sending everything unencrypted 
in plain text, but only on my LAN. 
Stay with me here.

Then a bright shining realization 
occurred. I doubt that I'm the only 
person in the world who uses their 
work email extensively for file 
transfer. I email ideas and files to 
myself all the time.

Well, I like vintage tech, especially 
my BlackBerry Bold 9900. It has a very 
outdated email client (Logicmail). 
When I set up that LAN-only, 
unencrypted email system, I realized 
that it was the perfect setup to 
transfer files, notes, etc., quickly 
to the Bold.

So while I'll ultimately set up TLS 
and authentication for access to the 
email server from outside my LAN, I'm 
going to leave ports 25 and 143 open 
on the LAN, so I can send notes and 
files quickly and easily to my Bold, 
Lifedrive, Jornada and any other 
antiquated tech with an email client 
that I own. Personal, unfederated 
email servers -- so useful!

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It's been so nice to see a lot of the 
old regulars (Jynx, sloum, Slugmax, 
and tfurrows among others) posting on 
gopher recently. Perhaps my "Ghost 
Town" phlog entry was premature. 

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I'm glad I don't have to travel like 
Jynx. One or two flights a year is 
plenty for me. Oddly, I've only ever 
had to deal with one substantial delay 
and the airline (Westjet) paid for a 
hotel room. That was nice, but the 
whole thing was quite inconvenient. 
After a lot of anxiety and a two-hour 
post-flight drive, I got to work the 
next day about five minutes late.