New shell server beta testing

[scott]

Yes, This is the new beta server

I can send out the e-mails with Pine and the present server, and have done so for years now.

But with the new beta server and Alpine, I am encountering the problems which I briefly describe

Looking into this right now.

This error seems to be coming from google's intake servers, looking into it some more.

[scott]

Yes, This is the new beta server

I can send out the e-mails with Pine and the present server, and have done so for years now.

But with the new beta server and Alpine, I am encountering the problems which I briefly describe

Looking into this right now.

This error seems to be coming from google's intake servers, looking into it some more.

So sh.sonic.net was doing it's own mail delivery when you sent your message. This morning, I moved it to a "smarthost" configuration, where the mail gets sent out through our mail cluster. I think that has solved the problem.

In short: anti-spam measures were triggered due to sh.sonic.net trying to handle its own mail delivery. We are doing further review to ensure this is no longer a problem.

Sorry about the trouble, hopefully this hasn't created too much of an issue.

-Scott

[meyerbo2]

Many thanks indeed, Scott; I will try another group e-mail tomorrow and let you know what happens.

Joe

[meyerbo2]

Scott,

Further on the error messages I have been receiving.

After logging in once more to new beta server, and going to my folder IN.rarelaw, once more after a few minutes I received the following error message:

"[MAIL FOLDER "IN.rarelaw" CLOSED DUE TO ACCESS ERROR]"

Once more I could not access e-mails; this was unrelated to a group e-mail--it just happened!

So I cannot read the e-mails in that folder, just the headers.

Once again I have quit Alpine, got back into Alpine, and now I can once again read the e-mails. But clearly something is happening periodically to close this folder--what the cause is I am unsure. This has never happened with the old server.

[scott]

Scott,

Further on the error messages I have been receiving.

After logging in once more to new beta server, and going to my folder IN.rarelaw, once more after a few minutes I received the following error message:

"[MAIL FOLDER "IN.rarelaw" CLOSED DUE TO ACCESS ERROR]"

Once more I could not access e-mails; this was unrelated to a group e-mail--it just happened!

So I cannot read the e-mails in that folder, just the headers.

Once again I have quit Alpine, got back into Alpine, and now I can once again read the e-mails. But clearly something is happening periodically to close this folder--what the cause is I am unsure. This has never happened with the old server.

Sorry it took so long to get back to you, I've been fighting bronchitis...

The IMAP server will time out connections after a period, but as far as i can tell, alpine's default timeouts are well within those parameters. I'll have to experiment with timeout values in .pinerc to figure out the solution. If you want a head start, you could set all the check intervals to 60 seconds in pinerc and see if that helps...

-Scott

[gie]

Hope you're feeling better, Scott! I've checked out the new server more thoroughly now and the only issue I still see, which I assume is temporary, is that alpine Inbox has 0 messages -- is this indeed expected?
Procmail and alpine are otherwise behaving well, thank you.

[scott]

Hope you're feeling better, Scott! I've checked out the new server more thoroughly now and the only issue I still see, which I assume is temporary, is that alpine Inbox has 0 messages -- is this indeed expected?
Procmail and alpine are otherwise behaving well, thank you.

Hi gie! Yes, feeling much better -- still under the weather, but on the mend. Thanks for the concern.

If you type "alpine_help.sh" on the new shell server, it will give you some line items you can add to your .pinerc. The new way to access email from the new shell server is via secure IMAP. However, you can still keep your folders in your home directory under ~/mail if you'd like, that is the default behavior.

So to see your inbox, run that command, and set the inbox-path (but not the folder-collections). If you convert your folders to IMAP, you'll have to point your procmail recipes to use the new mailboxes, as well as set the folder-collections to the new location. If you have a lot of mail folders, that might not be optimal, but if we ever move to a spiffier type of mail spool, having everying in IMAP will (hopefully) keep things neat and tidy.

There's more information about moving mailboxes to IMAP here:

https://wiki.sonic.net/wiki/Shell_Acces ... _server.3F

Finally, if in doubt, be sure and back up your mail. We certainly don't want folks losing anything!

Hope this helps...

-Scott

[gie]

Thank you, and now I understand what the questions are about storing the password. Given my disability, it really impacts me to have to type my passphrase again when logging in -- not pleased about this at all.

[kgc]

A macro in your ssh client is another possible solution to prevent needing to type in a password every time you launch your mail program.

[gie]

Thank you, I'll look into that, but usually I'm using ConnectBot from an Android phone and I don't think that's possible offhand.

I worked with aid earlier to try to get a self-signed SSL certificate into the right smime directories to store password but couldn't get it working.

Do I understand right that if I had passwordless ssh set up from new she'll server to the IMAP server, that could also take care of it?