Re: Building a secure communications server

[Pjotr Prins]

On Wed, May 17, 2017 at 02:26:20PM +0200, Cl??ment Lassieur wrote:
> Thanks for working on this, I like the idea, and I have always wanted to
> do something similar.

Yes, I am surprised so few people here run their own :)

> I don't understand how your server can run phases 1 to 3, since Postfix
> isn't packaged.  I guess you are running a foreign distro, which means
> you are still pretty far from you goal.

On the mail servers I normally run Debian with some Guix on top. I
have had mail servers since 1996 or so - it was one incentive to try
Linux at the time. My Linux first server (hosted in Bangladesh) was
running sendmail over uucp(!). I came to smtp late :)

I think it is not so much work to replicate my setup in Guix. For me
it will be new to work with GuixSD images and configuring shepherd
etc.

But I am sure we can get some help there.

> My own mail server runs GuixSD with OpenSMTPD, which works very well (I
> even have one client!).  Is there an important feature OpenSMTPD is
> missing?  If so, we should package Postfix as a first step.
> 
> Same question with Courier-Imap: why don't you use Dovecot?  Its Scheme
> configuration is very nice, and it seems much more popular than
> Courier-Imap anyway.

Both great suggestions. Let me read up on them. I have been using the
others because of an early start. Postfix has been very good to me.

One reason to make this list is to invite ideas...

> Also, I would push for a Jabber service rather than an IRC service,
> because Jabber (XMPP) is decentralized.

Absolutely! Japper is on. Git service is another.

Pj.