OT: Best Free Email (POP Only)

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 10:53:12 -0800, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno
<DLU1@DecadentLinuxUser.org> Gave us:

I now look online for old legacy stuff, as trying to round up working
install packages here is not always easy. No nefarious purpose. I own
the discs, so finding already done copies is not a crime. Gotta love the
internet. AND QEMU AND DOSBox.

AND Old hardware! (I speak for myself :)) (where's my coffee?!)(Maybe
put some Jamison's in there)
Click to expand...

Heheheh... If you own it, flaunt it, baby!

(if you do not, don't touch)(BRL!)

<https://winworldpc.com/library>
 
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 10:53:12 -0800, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno
<DLU1@DecadentLinuxUser.org> wrote:

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 11:38:53 -0700, Jim Thompson
To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon@On-My-Web-Site.com> Gave us:

Some years ago, when I still had a 5-1/4" floppy drive that a PC knew
how to talk to, I copied all my really old stuff to CD's ;-)

Good move, because floppies are notorious for becoming unreadable.
And it is usually the drive, not the disc. Picky read/reject/give-up
code. My 2.88 laser aligned floppies NEVER EVER lost a single bit of
data ever. Try to find a drive or motherboard BIOS with support though.
Near impossible. Sad too, since they were far superior. Got left
behind with other "overpriced" (by the mindset of the day) IBM PS2 type
"proprietary think" technology, just as they ushered in Iomega's triple
overpriced utter crap, which everyone embraced simply because of
capacity numbers. I still have 2.88 drives and discs and even an old
machine somewhere with the right BIOS. I think one can still buy a PCIs
I/O card with a floppy interface on it that carries it.

I wanted to backup my DesqViewX install floppy images, and was so
frustrated trying. Then I found the dang image set online! AND QEMM
386 too! Pretty sure even Bloggs could hunt up and DL a full set within
a few minutes online, if he wasn't such a caveman.
Click to expand...

Wishful thinking ?>:-}

I now look online for old legacy stuff, as trying to round up working
install packages here is not always easy. No nefarious purpose. I own
the discs, so finding already done copies is not a crime. Gotta love the
internet. AND QEMU AND DOSBox.
Click to expand...

I still (very) occasionally find a use for QEMM386.

About the only legacy stuff I use now are a tool that converts PCWrite
document files to Word; and I, once in a while, haul out the old
original OrCAD symbol libraries so I can convert those schematics to
PSpice.

AND Old hardware! (I speak for myself :)) (where's my coffee?!)(Maybe
put some Jamison's in there)
Click to expand...

Sounds good... I'm a Drambuie fan myself ;-)

...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |

I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
 
Jim Thompson wrote:

On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 11:57:46 -0800, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

Spend a few bucks a month and do it right.

Real helpful, John =D> Spend it where?

...Jim Thompson
Click to expand...

Well, my solution isn't for everyone. I host my own smtp server
on my company web server. That, of course, filters NOTHING.
Then, I use the spam filters on Thunderbird. The first day it
is pretty awful, then the next day it throws everything into
the junk folder, and you go through it and "un-junk" the good
messages. After that, it is quite well trained, and VERY rarely
misclassifies any messages.

Well, works for me, anyway.

Jon
 
"Jim Thompson" <To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote in
message news:c5t16apc491t0vt5d6pe43hjdur6di2v4g@4ax.com...
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:02:07 -0800, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:36:36 -0700, Jim Thompson
To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:27:25 -0500, Phil Hobbs
hobbs@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 11/10/2014 7:53 AM, David Brown wrote:
[snip]

We agree that setting up email isn't very difficult, but we obviously
have very different philosophies of backing up stuff. As far as I'm
concerned, if it isn't backed up on discs that I can touch myself, it
isn't backed up. Server-side backup is a nice-to-have, for sure, but
Google can turn the lights out on Gmail any time it wants. I have
backups of my mail from two or three mail servers that no longer exist
(including some from VM mainframe days).

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Back-up... I have everything on my local hard-drive _plus_
additionally written to CD's or DVD's.

Terabyte USB hard drives are under $100 nowadays. I back up my mail
daily, rotating backups, and monthly propagate that to my offsite PCs.

DVDs are so last century.

But DVD's and CD's don't die arbitrarily like USB drives... I had one
die on me last month. Fortunately it was just stuff of which I had
original copy.

...Jim Thompson
--
Click to expand...
As long as they don't age like 8 inch floppy disk. In 25 years, will you be
able to read them on your current hardware or will you need to keep legacy
devices around?
 
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 15:06:07 -0500, "Tom Miller"
<tmiller11147@verizon.net> wrote:

"Jim Thompson" <To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote in
message news:c5t16apc491t0vt5d6pe43hjdur6di2v4g@4ax.com...
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:02:07 -0800, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:36:36 -0700, Jim Thompson
To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:27:25 -0500, Phil Hobbs
hobbs@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 11/10/2014 7:53 AM, David Brown wrote:
[snip]

We agree that setting up email isn't very difficult, but we obviously
have very different philosophies of backing up stuff. As far as I'm
concerned, if it isn't backed up on discs that I can touch myself, it
isn't backed up. Server-side backup is a nice-to-have, for sure, but
Google can turn the lights out on Gmail any time it wants. I have
backups of my mail from two or three mail servers that no longer exist
(including some from VM mainframe days).

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Back-up... I have everything on my local hard-drive _plus_
additionally written to CD's or DVD's.

Terabyte USB hard drives are under $100 nowadays. I back up my mail
daily, rotating backups, and monthly propagate that to my offsite PCs.

DVDs are so last century.

But DVD's and CD's don't die arbitrarily like USB drives... I had one
die on me last month. Fortunately it was just stuff of which I had
original copy.

...Jim Thompson
--
As long as they don't age like 8 inch floppy disk. In 25 years, will you be
able to read them on your current hardware or will you need to keep legacy
devices around?
Click to expand...

I kept an old WFWG machine around for many years, hung on the network,
just so I could read old floppies. When it finally started doing
weird crashes I quickly read off everything from 5-1/4" and 3-1/2"
onto CD's.

When I see signs of new equipment not supporting CD's I'll do a
similar transformation. (I have schematics saved from at least 35
years back on CD's... before that, paper, though I have converted even
some of those to PDF's ;-)

...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |

I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
 
On 11/10/2014 10:21 AM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 11/10/2014 12:02 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:36:36 -0700, Jim Thompson
To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:27:25 -0500, Phil Hobbs
hobbs@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 11/10/2014 7:53 AM, David Brown wrote:
[snip]

We agree that setting up email isn't very difficult, but we obviously
have very different philosophies of backing up stuff. As far as I'm
concerned, if it isn't backed up on discs that I can touch myself, it
isn't backed up. Server-side backup is a nice-to-have, for sure, but
Google can turn the lights out on Gmail any time it wants. I have
backups of my mail from two or three mail servers that no longer exist
(including some from VM mainframe days).

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Back-up... I have everything on my local hard-drive _plus_
additionally written to CD's or DVD's.

Terabyte USB hard drives are under $100 nowadays. I back up my mail
daily, rotating backups, and monthly propagate that to my offsite PCs.

DVDs are so last century.
Click to expand...

Until, of course, you get a "single spindle failure" and discover you
now have terabytes of data that need to be recovered by a professional
service bureau!

(I keep all my "precious" archives on small spindles in redundant
configurations. My archives date back more than 30 years and I've not
lost anything -- yet! Wanna know how many minutes I spent talking on
the phone with client X in 1985 and what each call was about?? :-/ )

> I have a couple of 3-TB RAID-5 NAS boxes, one at the lab and one at home.

As with any mechanism upon which you presumably rely, you *have*, of course,
tried "dropping" a drive and rebuilding the array? <grin> I.e., you
(presumably) TRUST the array so shouldn't feel nervous about pulling a
single drive and watching to see how it fares? (after all, even if one of
the remaining drives COINCIDENTALLY died, you'd still have the HOPEFULLY
good drive in your hands with which to rebuild the array!)

With consumer-grade drives, once you get to larger capacities, a *real*
failure often results in an inability to rebuild the array before some
*other* aspect of the array goes down (e.g., another drive that is exactly
the same age/make/model as the first failing drive, has lived in the same
environment as the first failed drive, is powered by the same power supply,
driven by the same processor, etc.). You might be surprised at just how long
it takes to rebuild a large array! Keeping in mind that you have *no*
protection during that process (and, no guarantee that the array *will*
be rebuildable -- an unrecoverable read error on one of the remaining
drives can leave you with <crap>!)

If your NAS doesn't contain a hot spare, then you have to hope you "notice"
the failure and take actions to recover before the other shoe drops...

Consumer-grade NAS's are another can of worms altogether!

Have you tried pulling the *set* of drives and installing them in another
("identical") RAID enclosure to see if they will be recognized as a complete
set or (despairingly!) marked as "foreign" (and, thus, trash!)? Said another
way, when your "box" dies, how will you access/recover the data that it was
charged with protecting?

When my archive started growing, I initially adopted the approach of running
shelves -- first as JBOD's, then escalating levels of RAID. But, it was damn
near impossible to *think* in the same room (a dozen or more 15K U320
drives)! Way overkill (and, too many single points of failure!) Yet,
this was all enterprise class hardware!

If you want to keep a single archive in a single enclosure, then do yourself
a favor and step up to RAID6 -- or over to RAID10 -- or reduce the size of
the archive.

Or, plan on a preventative replication and replacement strategy.

If it's truly an *archive*, then the biggest favor you can do yourself
is to move to redundant *boxes* so they see different environments, wear,
etc.

I currently use multiple small spindles on different hosts and different
media types. I've abandoned the large shelf approaches (though the redundant
power supplies gave some level of reassurance) and am now moving towards
*individual* drives in USB enclosures. This gives you the ability to swap
drives (even "hot"!) without having to keep a boatload of sleds for different
shelves. It also lets you mix and match drive technologies (to a limited
extent -- but, far more than a shelf or dedicated appliance does!)

And, if you adopt the goal of making media "portable" between "machines"
(whether those are NAS's, workstations or whatever), then even a failure
of "The NAS" on which a volume was mounted is only a minor inconvenience...
just unplug the USB cable and plug it into another NAS, Workstation, etc.

I'd have loved to be able to find a "single drive NAS" onto which I
could install my own software and, thus, let the "drive interface" be
a network protocol instead of "USB protocol". But, the price point
of processor+power supply+medium just doesn't make sense in today's
market!

So, I'll be assembling multi-drive (USB) NAS appliances out of tiny
(SBC) headless machines. That way, I can mount 1 drive (or 20!)
concurrently as my needs dictate. Or, just SneakerNet individual drives
to whichever workstation needs "lots of access" to it! (I used to do
this with off-lined SCSI/SCA drives -- plug drive into enclosure and
spin it up for "local" access!)

[Of course, this LOW level of performance is satisfactory as it's JUST
an archive -- not a file service -- and only has to support a single user!
But, even USB2 drives can EASILY saturate 100Mb links (though my workstations
and servers are all Gb)]
 
On 11/10/2014 8:27 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 15:26:11 -0700, Don Y <this@is.not.me.com> wrote:

On 11/10/2014 10:21 AM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 11/10/2014 12:02 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:36:36 -0700, Jim Thompson
To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:27:25 -0500, Phil Hobbs
hobbs@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 11/10/2014 7:53 AM, David Brown wrote:
[snip]

We agree that setting up email isn't very difficult, but we obviously
have very different philosophies of backing up stuff. As far as I'm
concerned, if it isn't backed up on discs that I can touch myself, it
isn't backed up. Server-side backup is a nice-to-have, for sure, but
Google can turn the lights out on Gmail any time it wants. I have
backups of my mail from two or three mail servers that no longer exist
(including some from VM mainframe days).

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Back-up... I have everything on my local hard-drive _plus_
additionally written to CD's or DVD's.

Terabyte USB hard drives are under $100 nowadays. I back up my mail
daily, rotating backups, and monthly propagate that to my offsite PCs.

DVDs are so last century.

Until, of course, you get a "single spindle failure" and discover you
now have terabytes of data that need to be recovered by a professional
service bureau!

We do everything RAID, and are psychotic about backups.
Click to expand...

Remove one of your drives (or replace it with a foreign drive) to
simulate a failure. See how long it takes to rebuild the array.

With large drives (failing "naturally"), the time it takes for
an array rebuild -- plus the likelihood that you will encounter
an unrecoverable read error on one of the other drives in the
set -- leads to alarmingly high *practical* failure rates.

Here's one such calculator to give you an idea how *often*
you can expect to encounter a failure. And, how often you can
expect to LOSE DATA! :>

<https://www.memset.com/tools/raid-calculator/>

We do daily backups to a separate NAS box and weekly offsite backups
onto USB memory sticks, in write-once mode.
Click to expand...
 
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 15:26:11 -0700, Don Y <this@is.not.me.com> wrote:

On 11/10/2014 10:21 AM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 11/10/2014 12:02 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:36:36 -0700, Jim Thompson
To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:27:25 -0500, Phil Hobbs
hobbs@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 11/10/2014 7:53 AM, David Brown wrote:
[snip]

We agree that setting up email isn't very difficult, but we obviously
have very different philosophies of backing up stuff. As far as I'm
concerned, if it isn't backed up on discs that I can touch myself, it
isn't backed up. Server-side backup is a nice-to-have, for sure, but
Google can turn the lights out on Gmail any time it wants. I have
backups of my mail from two or three mail servers that no longer exist
(including some from VM mainframe days).

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Back-up... I have everything on my local hard-drive _plus_
additionally written to CD's or DVD's.

Terabyte USB hard drives are under $100 nowadays. I back up my mail
daily, rotating backups, and monthly propagate that to my offsite PCs.

DVDs are so last century.

Until, of course, you get a "single spindle failure" and discover you
now have terabytes of data that need to be recovered by a professional
service bureau!
Click to expand...

We do everything RAID, and are psychotic about backups.

We do daily backups to a separate NAS box and weekly offsite backups
onto USB memory sticks, in write-once mode.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
 
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 20:48:45 -0700, Don Y <this@is.not.me.com> wrote:

On 11/10/2014 8:27 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 15:26:11 -0700, Don Y <this@is.not.me.com> wrote:

On 11/10/2014 10:21 AM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 11/10/2014 12:02 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:36:36 -0700, Jim Thompson
To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:27:25 -0500, Phil Hobbs
hobbs@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 11/10/2014 7:53 AM, David Brown wrote:
[snip]

We agree that setting up email isn't very difficult, but we obviously
have very different philosophies of backing up stuff. As far as I'm
concerned, if it isn't backed up on discs that I can touch myself, it
isn't backed up. Server-side backup is a nice-to-have, for sure, but
Google can turn the lights out on Gmail any time it wants. I have
backups of my mail from two or three mail servers that no longer exist
(including some from VM mainframe days).

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Back-up... I have everything on my local hard-drive _plus_
additionally written to CD's or DVD's.

Terabyte USB hard drives are under $100 nowadays. I back up my mail
daily, rotating backups, and monthly propagate that to my offsite PCs.

DVDs are so last century.

Until, of course, you get a "single spindle failure" and discover you
now have terabytes of data that need to be recovered by a professional
service bureau!

We do everything RAID, and are psychotic about backups.

Remove one of your drives (or replace it with a foreign drive) to
simulate a failure. See how long it takes to rebuild the array.
Click to expand...

On my desktop PCs (ProLiants with hot-plug RAID) I occasionally pull
out a drive for one reason or another, and poke in a replacement. It
takes about 1.5 hours to resync them.




With large drives (failing "naturally"), the time it takes for
an array rebuild -- plus the likelihood that you will encounter
an unrecoverable read error on one of the other drives in the
set -- leads to alarmingly high *practical* failure rates.

Here's one such calculator to give you an idea how *often*
you can expect to encounter a failure. And, how often you can
expect to LOSE DATA! :

https://www.memset.com/tools/raid-calculator/
Click to expand...

We've used floppies, tape, hard drive cartriges, CDs, DVDs, and USB
sticks for backup. I don't think we've ever lost anything important.

Just make lots of copies.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
 
John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 15:26:11 -0700, Don Y <this@is.not.me.com> wrote:

On 11/10/2014 10:21 AM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 11/10/2014 12:02 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:36:36 -0700, Jim Thompson
To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:27:25 -0500, Phil Hobbs
hobbs@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 11/10/2014 7:53 AM, David Brown wrote:
[snip]

We agree that setting up email isn't very difficult, but we obviously
have very different philosophies of backing up stuff. As far as I'm
concerned, if it isn't backed up on discs that I can touch myself, it
isn't backed up. Server-side backup is a nice-to-have, for sure, but
Google can turn the lights out on Gmail any time it wants. I have
backups of my mail from two or three mail servers that no longer exist
(including some from VM mainframe days).

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Back-up... I have everything on my local hard-drive _plus_
additionally written to CD's or DVD's.

Terabyte USB hard drives are under $100 nowadays. I back up my mail
daily, rotating backups, and monthly propagate that to my offsite PCs.

DVDs are so last century.

Until, of course, you get a "single spindle failure" and discover you
now have terabytes of data that need to be recovered by a professional
service bureau!


We do everything RAID, and are psychotic about backups.

We do daily backups to a separate NAS box and weekly offsite backups
onto USB memory sticks, in write-once mode.
Click to expand...

There's also something to be said for scouring the backups and doing a
MD5 hash of all the files, comparing the original and the copy.


--
Les Cargill
 
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 22:10:50 -0600, Les Cargill <lcargill99@comcast.com>
Gave us:

snip

There's also something to be said for scouring the backups and doing a
MD5 hash of all the files, comparing the original and the copy.
Click to expand...

That's just silly. The file copy code, and the drive hardware itself
should insure that each file was written correctly. This extra step
just further exercises the equipment, narrowing the window until a
possible failure. With the backup being at least mirrored, there is yet
another check going on. No need to worry, Les. They spent decades
incorporating that into the drive itself.

Such checks are for optical disc burn efficacy proofing, not much
else. Really big datagrams. Huge database files.

Hard to write a bad file IF files are what is being backed up.
Another reason that "backup without an OS" thread was doomed.
 
On 10/11/14 15:27, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 11/10/2014 7:53 AM, David Brown wrote:
On 10/11/14 13:27, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 11/10/2014 4:36 AM, David Brown wrote:
On 09/11/14 19:35, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 11/8/2014 3:46 PM, David Brown wrote:
On 08/11/14 17:19, Jim Thompson wrote:
Cox is driving me nuts with their nanny-state behavior...

Their Spam trap only allows options on where to send the spam
after it's marked... no way to opt out of any marking... so just
about everything I receive is marked "-- Spam --" :-(

So I'm looking for a free Email service that I can forward Email
to from my website, then POP it to me.

Some service that won't stick ads into incoming mail.

Recommendations?


Why POP? The only use of POP is in fetchmail scripts to then pass on
the mail to a proper mailserver (as an alternative to setting up a
mailserver that will receive the mail directly). POP is a hopeless
choice if you are using a mail client - with normal setups, the
single client pulls everything off the server.

Only if you set it up wrong. Plus most mail hosting outfits let you
turn that off at the server. Even Gmail.


You only need to get it wrong once to screw your whole setup. You set
up client 1 to collect by POP but leave the messages on the server.
You
set up client 2 the same, and you've got the messages on both. You set
up client 3, but forget to set the "leave messages on server" box
before
you start, and they are gone from the server.

But more importantly, using POP3 like this only works if you have a
small number of messages, no structure (such as folders), no
interest in
tracking outgoing emails, and are happy to "read" the same email on
every client. It was perhaps not too bad a decade ago, but when you
have had an email account under heavy use for some years, you want
something better. And when you have multiple clients (such as a
telephone, a pad, a couple of desktops, a laptop - plus webmail
clients)
with the same email account, you want them synchronised and the
incoming, archived and sent emails all available.

That means you can only connect one machine to the account, and when
that machine fails or corrupts its mailfile, you have lost
everything. (You can, in theory, leave mail undeleted on the server
- but with POP that brings its own problems.)

I would /never/ recommend POP - use IMAP (or exchange, if you can't
avoid it).

You've got that exactly backwards. With POP, you can have N local
copies of everything. I have email backups going back into the 1980s,
from half a dozen email servers. Good luck doing that with IMAP.

You can backup your local copies of IMAP mails without trouble. A
decent desktop email client will happily let you download folders for
"offline use" - then you save the folders in whatever backup system you
want. For more sophisticated backup, use imapsync to make copies
(including updating old backups, rather than downloading everything
again) - and you can serve out these downloaded copies using an IMAP
server so that your backup copies are conveniently accessible.

Of course, the best idea is to make sure the server has good backups
and
replication, such as by using a solid server company or doing your own
imap serving.

That's way too much like work. I just turn off deletion on the server,
and use POP3 everyplace. Knowing when I last read my mail takes care of
the multiple new messages problem, so it isn't an issue.


Registering a gmail account, then connecting by imap is not a great deal
of work. It is far less work than messing around with pop3 backups - it
is even less work than remembering to disable server deletion on pop3.
And if you prefer Rackspace to gmail, using imap is not exactly rocket
science there either. The hosting company will handle the backups.


We agree that setting up email isn't very difficult, but we obviously
have very different philosophies of backing up stuff. As far as I'm
concerned, if it isn't backed up on discs that I can touch myself, it
isn't backed up. Server-side backup is a nice-to-have, for sure, but
Google can turn the lights out on Gmail any time it wants. I have
backups of my mail from two or three mail servers that no longer exist
(including some from VM mainframe days).
Click to expand...

It all depends on who you trust here - your server must be with someone
you trust (you are also trusting them with the privacy of your mail, the
reliability of your mail transfers, and with the continuity of your mail
address). If you are not keen on Gmail, that's fine - certainly a
zero-cost provider has fewer responsibilities than one who charges for
their services. At my company, the mail server is at a company we trust
to handle backups, redundancy, etc. My personal mail is on a server
that I trust - it is in my cellar at home (a dovecot imap server is easy
to get in place, and requires no maintenance).

But all this is a side issue - as I said above, client-side backup of
IMAP is no harder than client-side backup of POP3. With IMAP, you can
easily have the same backups to discs, /and/ you (should) have backups
at the server.
 
David Brown wrote:

snip

I would /never/ recommend POP - use IMAP (or exchange, if you can't
avoid it).

So with that in mind, you could do far worse than a gmail account - it
is reliable, easy to use, works fine with IMAP, and has a workable web
interface for when you need it.
Click to expand...

IMAP is the way to go. For one thing, if you have multiple places 9desktop,
notebook, phone, tablet) where you access email, everything is synced. IMAP
is the only "cloud" I believe in. Even your drafts are synced. It is really
good technology.

I can't imagine a hosting company that doesn't provide email. You run
SpamAssassin and the problem is solved.
> https://spamassassin.apache.org/
A sharp 10 year old could set this up if the hosting company has the
installatron.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Installatron
 
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno wrote:
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 22:10:50 -0600, Les Cargill <lcargill99@comcast.com
Gave us:

snip


There's also something to be said for scouring the backups and doing a
MD5 hash of all the files, comparing the original and the copy.

That's just silly. The file copy code, and the drive hardware itself
should insure that each file was written correctly. This extra step
just further exercises the equipment, narrowing the window until a
possible failure. With the backup being at least mirrored, there is yet
another check going on. No need to worry, Les. They spent decades
incorporating that into the drive itself.
Click to expand...

Over a span of 20 or so years, the Md5 hash thing saved me three times.

I have had, in other words, three seperate backed up files that had a
different signature than the original.

YMMV.


Such checks are for optical disc burn efficacy proofing, not much
else. Really big datagrams. Huge database files.

Hard to write a bad file IF files are what is being backed up.
Another reason that "backup without an OS" thread was doomed.
Click to expand...

--
Les Cargill
 
In article <m3u8ks$5l8$2@dont-email.me>,
Les Cargill <lcargill99@comcast.com> wrote:
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno wrote:

That's just silly. The file copy code, and the drive hardware itself
should insure that each file was written correctly. This extra step
just further exercises the equipment, narrowing the window until a
possible failure. With the backup being at least mirrored, there is yet
another check going on. No need to worry, Les. They spent decades
incorporating that into the drive itself.


Over a span of 20 or so years, the Md5 hash thing saved me three times.

I have had, in other words, three seperate backed up files that had a
different signature than the original.

YMMV.
Click to expand...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_corruption has some decent citations
for actual studies on the problem of "silent data corruption" - hard
drive errors that are not detected by the drive firmware or the host
O/S.

It's not a trivial problem. Silent data loss can occur as a result of
firmware bugs, bits going bad in RAM (host or drive) at a time when
they're not covered by an error-detecting/correcting code, or by
errors on the media which happen to exceed the data correction and
detection capabilities of the error correcting codes used on the media
(commonly Reed-Solomon).

The error-correcting methodologies used on the hard drives must,
necessarily, have limits. Some errors will always exceed the drive's
ability to detect them... if just the wrong set of bits in a sector
(data + ECC) gets scrambled, the data can "look good" to the error
detection algorithm. Or, in other cases, the error correction process
does kick in, but doesn't have sufficient redundency, and ends up
making the wrong correction (but thinking it's right).

In these cases, mirroring won't help you much. At best, your mirror
system will read what appear to be two "equally good, but different"
copies of the data, compare them, realize there's a problem, and send
up a flare and insist on a manual fix. Many mirroring systems read
only one copy of the data, on any given access, and only read the
other if the first turns out to be unreadable... and a system of this
sort won't even be aware that there's a problem.

Maintaining a separate validity check (MD5, SHA-whatever, etc.) can at
least let you know that your data *has* rotted.
 
On 11/10/2014 9:10 PM, Les Cargill wrote:
There's also something to be said for scouring the backups and doing a MD5 hash
of all the files, comparing the original and the copy.
Click to expand...

+42

Though you don't have to store a hash of EVERY file -- just those things that
you want to treat as "verifiable units".

E.g.,

# mount -o rdonly /Archive
# cd /Archive/somewhere/
# tar cpf - . | md5 > ~/hash

It won't tell you which of the files under /Archive/somewhere is
corrupt (if any), but, it will tell you that none *appear* to be corrupt!

[if you have thousands of files beneath that point, you don't typically
want to store a hash for *each*. rather, you want a quick way of knowing
if *all* are OK -- or, if you need to check them individually against
other copies. by not packing all of them into a tarball AND STORING THAT
TARBALL, you can often have a greater chance of recovering individual
files "easier" -- instead of having to do surgery on a corrupted tarball!]

If the verification step fails, then you can do a file-by-file compare
against other archive copies.

Having different copies on different spindles, different boxes and
different types of media greatly increases your chance of being able
to recover in the event of an error.

RAID arrays that don't scrub will never tell you of an error -- unless
you explicitly go *looking* for the file that is corrupted (of course,
you don't *know* that it is corrupted so it -- and many others -- may
have silently crapped out and you don't know about any of those LOSSES
until much later... when the bitrot has spread!)

A buddy used to backup ROM images of all his equipment on his
computer thinking that this would preserve them -- as he would
backup his computer "often"! He never considered the possibility
that an image could rot in place and, thereafter, be perpetually
preserved in its corrupted state ("No need to keep the backups
from 2 years ago... I've got monthly backups for the last year,
weekly backups for the last month and daily backups for the last
week... what could POSSIBLY go wrong??")

Sort of like backing up to TAPE, religiously... then, never retentioning
the backups! Ooops!
 
On 11/10/2014 9:38 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 20:48:45 -0700, Don Y <this@is.not.me.com> wrote:

On 11/10/2014 8:27 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 15:26:11 -0700, Don Y <this@is.not.me.com> wrote:

On 11/10/2014 10:21 AM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 11/10/2014 12:02 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:36:36 -0700, Jim Thompson
To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:27:25 -0500, Phil Hobbs
hobbs@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 11/10/2014 7:53 AM, David Brown wrote:
[snip]

We agree that setting up email isn't very difficult, but we obviously
have very different philosophies of backing up stuff. As far as I'm
concerned, if it isn't backed up on discs that I can touch myself, it
isn't backed up. Server-side backup is a nice-to-have, for sure, but
Google can turn the lights out on Gmail any time it wants. I have
backups of my mail from two or three mail servers that no longer exist
(including some from VM mainframe days).

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Back-up... I have everything on my local hard-drive _plus_
additionally written to CD's or DVD's.

Terabyte USB hard drives are under $100 nowadays. I back up my mail
daily, rotating backups, and monthly propagate that to my offsite PCs.

DVDs are so last century.

Until, of course, you get a "single spindle failure" and discover you
now have terabytes of data that need to be recovered by a professional
service bureau!

We do everything RAID, and are psychotic about backups.

Remove one of your drives (or replace it with a foreign drive) to
simulate a failure. See how long it takes to rebuild the array.

On my desktop PCs (ProLiants with hot-plug RAID) I occasionally pull
out a drive for one reason or another, and poke in a replacement. It
takes about 1.5 hours to resync them.
Click to expand...

What level RAID? What size volume? Does it scrub? Or, are you left
to "discover" your losses down the road (when you decide you *need*
a particular file)?

You should also see if you can "move" an array (or portions of it)
to another "identical" machine. E.g., anticipate how you will
deal with a general hardware failure (bad motherboard, etc.).

[Of course, if you're using it for a workstation, it's probably not
truly an archive but, rather, "working copy"]

The fact that RAID volumes couldn't *readily* be recovered (one vendor
to another, etc.) is what drove me away from the technology where
implemented in "turn key" fashion. I'm now moving all my archives
to "common" media formats so I can process individual volumes without
requiring some particular manufacturer's hardware/software.

(i.e., I should be able to examine and recover data on *any* volume
without relying on *any* particular make/manufacturer of "interface
hardware/software")

With large drives (failing "naturally"), the time it takes for
an array rebuild -- plus the likelihood that you will encounter
an unrecoverable read error on one of the other drives in the
set -- leads to alarmingly high *practical* failure rates.

Here's one such calculator to give you an idea how *often*
you can expect to encounter a failure. And, how often you can
expect to LOSE DATA! :

https://www.memset.com/tools/raid-calculator/

We've used floppies, tape, hard drive cartriges, CDs, DVDs, and USB
sticks for backup. I don't think we've ever lost anything important.

Just make lots of copies.
Click to expand...

Yup. I keep two copies on "high throughput" media (enterprise grade
magnetic disk); a copy on commodity media (CD/DVD); some things
on tape (DLT/SDLT/Ultrium) and others on MO. *NOTHING* "on-line"
unless its being accessed!

But, like good gardens, they need to be "tended" regularly!

Also, thinking hard about what's *really* important to save is
time well spent. In the past year, I've been purging my archives
of everything "client related" (they were warned... if they haven't
kept a copy or requested mine... <shrug> let them find a service
if they don't want to handle it themselves!)
 
On Wed, 12 Nov 2014 20:41:31 -0700, Don Y <this@is.not.me.com> wrote:

On 11/10/2014 9:38 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 20:48:45 -0700, Don Y <this@is.not.me.com> wrote:

On 11/10/2014 8:27 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 15:26:11 -0700, Don Y <this@is.not.me.com> wrote:

On 11/10/2014 10:21 AM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 11/10/2014 12:02 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:36:36 -0700, Jim Thompson
To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:27:25 -0500, Phil Hobbs
hobbs@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 11/10/2014 7:53 AM, David Brown wrote:
[snip]

We agree that setting up email isn't very difficult, but we obviously
have very different philosophies of backing up stuff. As far as I'm
concerned, if it isn't backed up on discs that I can touch myself, it
isn't backed up. Server-side backup is a nice-to-have, for sure, but
Google can turn the lights out on Gmail any time it wants. I have
backups of my mail from two or three mail servers that no longer exist
(including some from VM mainframe days).

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Back-up... I have everything on my local hard-drive _plus_
additionally written to CD's or DVD's.

Terabyte USB hard drives are under $100 nowadays. I back up my mail
daily, rotating backups, and monthly propagate that to my offsite PCs.

DVDs are so last century.

Until, of course, you get a "single spindle failure" and discover you
now have terabytes of data that need to be recovered by a professional
service bureau!

We do everything RAID, and are psychotic about backups.

Remove one of your drives (or replace it with a foreign drive) to
simulate a failure. See how long it takes to rebuild the array.

On my desktop PCs (ProLiants with hot-plug RAID) I occasionally pull
out a drive for one reason or another, and poke in a replacement. It
takes about 1.5 hours to resync them.

What level RAID? What size volume? Does it scrub? Or, are you left
to "discover" your losses down the road (when you decide you *need*
a particular file)?
Click to expand...

I think it's raid1, namely the same data on two drives. 62G drives for
C:, which is the OS and my apps. I have other drives, local and USB
and network, for the big stuff.

You should also see if you can "move" an array (or portions of it)
to another "identical" machine. E.g., anticipate how you will
deal with a general hardware failure (bad motherboard, etc.).
Click to expand...

I do that now and then, clone my work PC to the identical machines at
home and in the cabin. It always works.

The weird thing is that a drive is always a slot1 drive or a slot2
drive. I can pull a drive from my work machine, either one, and plug
in a replacement, and the drives sync. The pulled drive can be used to
boot another machine, but only in the corresponding slot. Once a
cloned machine boots, I hot-plug a drive into the empty slot and, in
an hour or so, I have two identical drives in that one, too.




[Of course, if you're using it for a workstation, it's probably not
truly an archive but, rather, "working copy"]

The fact that RAID volumes couldn't *readily* be recovered (one vendor
to another, etc.) is what drove me away from the technology where
implemented in "turn key" fashion. I'm now moving all my archives
to "common" media formats so I can process individual volumes without
requiring some particular manufacturer's hardware/software.

(i.e., I should be able to examine and recover data on *any* volume
without relying on *any* particular make/manufacturer of "interface
hardware/software")

With large drives (failing "naturally"), the time it takes for
an array rebuild -- plus the likelihood that you will encounter
an unrecoverable read error on one of the other drives in the
set -- leads to alarmingly high *practical* failure rates.

Here's one such calculator to give you an idea how *often*
you can expect to encounter a failure. And, how often you can
expect to LOSE DATA! :

https://www.memset.com/tools/raid-calculator/

We've used floppies, tape, hard drive cartriges, CDs, DVDs, and USB
sticks for backup. I don't think we've ever lost anything important.

Just make lots of copies.

Yup. I keep two copies on "high throughput" media (enterprise grade
magnetic disk); a copy on commodity media (CD/DVD); some things
on tape (DLT/SDLT/Ultrium) and others on MO. *NOTHING* "on-line"
unless its being accessed!

But, like good gardens, they need to be "tended" regularly!

Also, thinking hard about what's *really* important to save is
time well spent. In the past year, I've been purging my archives
of everything "client related" (they were warned... if they haven't
kept a copy or requested mine... <shrug> let them find a service
if they don't want to handle it themselves!)
Click to expand...

I never throw anything away! Not even old D-size vellum drawings.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
 
On 11/10/2014 12:27 PM, Jim Thompson wrote:
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:02:07 -0800, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:36:36 -0700, Jim Thompson
To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:27:25 -0500, Phil Hobbs
hobbs@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 11/10/2014 7:53 AM, David Brown wrote:
[snip]

We agree that setting up email isn't very difficult, but we obviously
have very different philosophies of backing up stuff. As far as I'm
concerned, if it isn't backed up on discs that I can touch myself, it
isn't backed up. Server-side backup is a nice-to-have, for sure, but
Google can turn the lights out on Gmail any time it wants. I have
backups of my mail from two or three mail servers that no longer exist
(including some from VM mainframe days).

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Back-up... I have everything on my local hard-drive _plus_
additionally written to CD's or DVD's.

Terabyte USB hard drives are under $100 nowadays. I back up my mail
daily, rotating backups, and monthly propagate that to my offsite PCs.

DVDs are so last century.

But DVD's and CD's don't die arbitrarily like USB drives... I had one
die on me last month. Fortunately it was just stuff of which I had
original copy.
Click to expand...

Sure they can. I have some CDs that are no longer readable. If it is
important and longer term backup, I always use multiple CDs or DVDs.
For something like a weekly backup I used to use a single disk, but now
it do it to a 3 TB hard drive since it is unlikely that I will lose both
the backup HD and the computer HD at the same time. But for the *very*
important stuff I use off site storage...

--

Rick
 
In article <m437n0$g77$2@dont-email.me>, rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> wrote:

But DVD's and CD's don't die arbitrarily like USB drives... I had one
die on me last month. Fortunately it was just stuff of which I had
original copy.

Sure they can. I have some CDs that are no longer readable.
Click to expand...

Yup. Even mass-manufactured ("pressed") CDs and DVDs can become
unreadable after storage, typically due to oxidation of the reflective
layer. Look up "bronzing" syndrome... I had several hard-to-replace
audio CDs go bronze and fail, some years ago.

CD-R and DVD+-R discs can also deteriorate over time. I prefer to buy
blanks from higher-end manufacturers (I like Taiyo Yuden / JVC) rather
than the cut-rate outfits, as the burn success rate and survivability
seem to be better.

If it is
important and longer term backup, I always use multiple CDs or DVDs.
Click to expand...

You might want to look into a neat little program called
"DVDisaster". It adds an additional level of Reed-Solomon error
correction to a CD or DVD ISO image - you can append the error
correction data to the ISO for burning, or store it separately. You
can choose the amount of additional Reed-Solomon redundancy to
add... from just-enough, to ridiculously-large.

If one or more sectors of the image become unreadable, you can slurp
in as much of the image as *is* readable, run DVDisaster in recovery
mode, and it will perform the calculations needed to restore the lost
sectors.

For something like a weekly backup I used to use a single disk, but now
it do it to a 3 TB hard drive since it is unlikely that I will lose both
the backup HD and the computer HD at the same time. But for the *very*
important stuff I use off site storage...
Click to expand...

Diversity in redundancy is a good strategy!
 
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