Hello everyone,
This Thursday (October 28) we have decided to meet to discuss the Free E-mail Association. We will meet at Gnutiken at 18:00.
I write this e-mail in English to allow for our non-Swedish friends to join the discussion, even if much of the information on the wiki is in Swedish. I do not see this changing any time soon (translation is hard work). Do not hesitate to ask if something is still unclear.
I have jotted down a few notes from the last meeting, and put up a suggestion for an agenda (sv: dagordning):
http://fellowship.se/wiki/Projekt/friepost/Protokoll
There are a few things to think about for this meeting, among others:
* What equipment/budget will be necessary? I think we made good progress last time, but please review the notes to make sure I got everything right.
* Membership fees. There is an example budget on the Wiki that offers food for thought:
http://fellowship.se/wiki/Projekt/friepost/Budget
* Is it acceptable to look for external funding, provided that it does not put us in a state of dependence? We have some suggestions for possible sponsors on the Wiki.
Since last time there have been progress on the software side of things. Me and Gustav have been hard at work setting up a test system. We have now configured Postfix on two servers.
All technical issues and uncertainties have been working themselves out splendidly well thus far. Last Thursday night we were able to relay the first e-mail from our mail gateway to the main mail server. This is obviously not the biggest accomplishment in the history of mankind, but for one thing it goes to show that complicated things like NFS are unnecessary. Not surprisingly, SMTP rocks on delivering e-mail!
It looks like propagating valid users/domains from the main server to the mail gateways is best done by keeping everything in a MySQL database on the main storage server that is replicated onto the mail gateways.
Technical documentation for all the systems can be found on github.com until we find resources to set up a proper git repository of our own. Me and Gustav are both very fond of Emacs org-mode, which means the docs are in that format. You can find the documentation (very much work in progress!) at:
http://github.com/skangas/fri-epost-docs
Or clone them directly:
git clone git@github.com:skangas/fri-epost-docs.git
Big kudos to Gustav for having pointed out repeatedly how crucial documentation is. The e-mail association must live on even if an administrator goes AWOL (personally I am not going anywhere, but I might get kidnapped... ;-)).
Sincerely, Stefan Kangas