I took the plunge today and upgraded my server to Debian Etch. All went pretty well, except that theQmailrocks mail setup was broken.

After a bit of fiddling about (recompiling qmail mostly), it seemed to be up and running, except that I can't log in via IMAP. Strange...

It turns out that the standard Courier-IMAP package in Etch has authentication against a password file (authvchkpw method) disabled.

Because I'm working away from home at client site much of the time, and un-snooped access to my home email is A Good Thing™ to have, setting up secure webmail was a priority for me when I moved to hosting my own email setup.

I've been using SquirrelMail for pretty much all that time - having a system that I can keep up to date using Debian's apt-get management tools is a strong incentive.

But I never really liked it - the interface is extremely clunky, and uses frames, which is a particular hate of mine. Recently though, improved Open Source webmail interfaces have been coming along like buses, no doubt inspired by the success of Gmail.

One's so good, I installed it for a test, and liked it so much, I repointed my webmail domain at it within 5 minutes.

You now can't email me from Brazil either...

If you're using a mail host in China and Korea, you can't email me any more, sorry.

Sender Policy Framework - a useful way to reject obvious spams from forged addresses before they hit a computationally intensive classification filter. The acronym association with Sun Protection Factor is intentional, apparently.

http://spf.pobox.com/

Spam - hate it or really hate it, you have to do something about it. Having recently moved my domain home, and being not altogether happy with the number of classification errors that SpamAssassin was throwing out these days, I've now moved to DSPAM, and it works really really well.