[liberationtech] Oakland Cryptoparty This Sunday at 1pm

[Rich Kulawiec]

On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 05:30:55PM +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> Relying on your ISP-issued relay or your mail provider's
> SMTP provides a convenient one-stop shop for information
> collection. It is definitely possible and desirable for
> small organisations and groups of users to run their own
> SMTP servers, and potentially also IMAP servers.

Yes, yes, and yes.  It's not that difficult to build a perfectly
serviceable system to handle this out of cheap hardware and 100%
open-source software.  Been there, done that, am writing the book.

One of many possible recipes for this: some old disused box,
OpenBSD, pf, sendmail, UW IMAP.  Another: Linux, iptables, postfix,
dovecot.  That's all that's needed. [1]

And for those organizations that need mailing list services: Mailman is
the tool of choice.  (It runs this list.)  To an very good approximation,
if you're trying to do something with a mailing list that Mailman doesn't
do, what you have in mind is a bad idea.

Now since I have (once again) opened my big mouth, I'll step up as well:
if any organizations want to get their email out of the cloud/third parties,
contact me off-list.  I have a pretty good stash of disused hardware
that could be put to work -- better that it be used for good than
gathering dust.

---rsk

[1] Yes, including anti-abuse controls.  Proper configuration of the
firewall and MTA deals with abuse beautifully and avoids the byzantine
complexity (with accompanying brittleness) of more complex architectures.