February, 3, 2002 archives

linus riffs on joel's don't start over theme.

(beware, high geek quotient here.) currently, my mail sits on my home server/mp3-player/firewall/etc, and i read it using mutt over ssh. this makes it a pain to view attachments. “i'll use imap,” i said to myself. but i won't touch the uw imapd with a ten foot pole, cyrus imapd wants to take over my mail spool, and courier imapd wants me to arrange my mail folders in strange ways, refuses to install correctly via apt-get, and is otherwise pretty wonky.

and even if i set up a real imap server, i'll either need to put my password into the mutt configuration file, or enter it every time i want to check my mail.

so i'm going to use mutt's "tunnel" feature to run an imap server over ssh (which will get its credentials via ssh-agent—single sign-on!). the trick now is writing an imap server. in perl. (again.)

have i mentioned that the imap spec bites?

oh, and before you make a snarky comment about having too much time on my hands, read this.