W-W-W-W-What?
Good day at work. Getting stuff done and a very good meeting with the mentor.
But, this is somewhat shadowed by a revelation […]
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I have to take a little existential break here, because what I had been typing, then deleting, before this current paragraph was completely ridiculous. I was attempting to mock the writing style and some of the content of Frank Herbert’s Dune in a dramatic adaptation of my thought processes regarding the following subject matter. Needless to say, I must be a complete lunatic today. Let’s leave it at that.
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So, I have been going around in circles today about mail systems. It’s been my little gedanken experiment for the day. I climbed onto the bus and a Herbert-ian italicized thought came into my head (hence the little misplaced Coda of this work):
But what is the ideal mail system?
I figured I couldn’t make a good one if I wasn’t sure what the best one would be. And, honestly, I had no clue what it would be when I started the morning today.
Many of my thoughts have circled around the organization of a virtual mail storage system (meaning, one that does not utilize system accounts and logins for each user). These always look great in a whitepaper until you realize that things like mail filtering really, really, really suck when you can’t switch to a unique system user account to perform the tasks. Plus, you have this constant, grinding problem of keeping all 3-5 programs in the daisy chain looking at the same list of users.
The closest thought I have ever produced with regard to a “perfect” system was a “what if” (a good gedanken start) question that had always been put away with a complacent, “Yeah, right. No way.” The question, O me, so sad, recurring, “If Dovecot only had an LDA (Local Delivery Agent, puts mail from the SMTP server’s queue into a user’s mail folder) that understood its own file structure, wouldn’t this be gravy?”
Of course (well, maybe not so obviously), the answer is a resounding “Yes, if it only existed.” Because, basically, you’ve lowered your “Number of Applications Needing to be Smart About Users” metric down one or two by keeping mail routing contained within a large, smart, essential software package like your POP/IMAP service.
Here’s the revelation: Dovecot has an LDA. Yes, I know I should have RTFM a little better. This sucker even has a filtering language (i.e., means of performing a spam check)!
This merits a trial run. We’re talking simple here, like two programs plus the filter. Major deal.
Well, I’m back on the clock.