I managed to solve one of the three problems that I talked about earlier by using teh G00gle. Apparently, you can use this script to mirror email to Gmail from a Berkeley format mail file. The command-line invocation is highly-bizarre, but it seemed to work on two out of the three mail files that I tried. So, I just mirrored all of my email from 1999 to 2001 to Gmail as a test, and it worked. Now, I’ll have a completely searchable mail archive indexed automagically. This had the by-product of syncing all of my old email to my Powerbook as well. So, now everything is anywhere I could possibly need it, backed up, and highly accessible. Before I put all of my old email in GMail have to go in with Mutt and manually find everything on a per-folder basis. I still have two problems left to solve: (1) Forwarding all sent mail from Mail.app to Gmail automatically using sendmail configuration foo, and (2) Getting all sent Gmail on to hudge.

I was infinitely proud of this last hack on OS X that seems to work. I wanted to send email from an arbitrary wireless or wired IP address from Mail.app. So, here’s what I did… I issued this command to route port 25 from suudsu to hudge!

sudo ssh -L 25:localhost:25 hoyhoy@hudge

Hudge is where involution.com is hosted and runs a mail server. So, I redirect my Powerbook’s port 25 to hudge, and configure Mail.app to use localhost as it’s outgoing sendmail server over an encrypted link via SSH I’m syncing my Powerbook to Gmail’s POP access (over SSL). Involution.com’s mail (*@involution.com) that is not stopped by Spamassassin, Bogofilter, DCC, or my custom virus notification and unreadable character set filters is forwarded to GMail if it’s not something that was sent from within gmail, and mails sent to hoyhoy@example.com are forwarded back to hudge which implicitly creates a backup. Also, I setup Mutt to BCC sent mail to GMail so it’s included in the archive. The only one that I haven’t figured out is how to make Mail.app BCC sent mail to Gmail, and how to make GMail send it’s sent mail back to hudge. I know there’s ample sendmail foo to be messed with, and I imagine it’s possible to replicate based on the fact that it knows when an email is coming from the Mail.app MUA and tony@involution.com, it is safe to mirror that to my user account on hudge. Similarly, I think I can actually hack Eric S. Raymond’s “fetchmail” program to download emails that I sent from GMail over POP3, and only grab any email that I didn’t send to myself, and archive it on hudge. These are automatically in Mail.app because it syncs to GMail POP3, and sent email is part of what’s downloaded. So, basically, I’m left with emails I sent from Mail.app only being in Mail.app, and email sent from GMail only going to Mail.app and not hudge, but everything else is mirrored everywhere. I used to keep Outlook running on Windows too, but I’ve since stopped being part of that whole scene about four years ago. I transferred all of my Outlook email over to Berkely format and use pine to look through it, on the rare occassion I need an email from before 2002. If only I could somehow get all of that imported to GMail, but that’s another story. Someone needs to write a GMailFS driver to where I can simply drag .eml files or entire mbx files and have them import.

Dang, the OpenAFS people seem to be hiding their release candidate packages. It took me a good hour of rooting around to happen across this one squirreled away in a hidden back alley of the intraweb. I even pinged their mailing list when I tried to build my own package and failed miserably. Oh well, now I know how to build and checkout branches of OpenAFS which probably isn’t a bad thing.

Several of the peeps have told me about the joys of using Synergy, but I didn’t really understand the point of it until the VNC project forked in twenty directions and I managed to connect a forth operating system up into my working environment today (Windows XP, Linux, AIX, OS X Tiger). I ran a Synergy server on my Linux workstation, and connected clients to the left and right of the monitors that it was driving. I actually hooked the Powerbook into Monitor 1’s secondary input so it drives the majority of my workspace. What I’m really wanting is a 30-inch cinema display and a way to get past our internal firewall on OS X, and I’d likely dump my Gnome and XP desktops altogether.