Last Updated on April 16, 2017 by Dave Farquhar
Sorry, I didn’t feel much like writing at all last night. I stayed up too late configuring my new fetchmail-procmail-courier-exim mailserver, so I felt fried all day. So I’ll just say this: The common UW-IMAP server that comes with most Linux distros is junk. It just works, yes, but it’s dog slow. Courier-IMAP is a pain to compile, but if you can find a binary for it, configuration isn’t too painful, and it absolutely flies. With my mail served off a Courier-IMAP server, reading it with Sylpheed, the speed is much higher than that of Outlook Express with the mail stored locally. Connecting to my UW-IMAP server was painful.
With that said, here are some links.
Gentoo Linux. This is another Linux-from-scratch-type distro. This one’s headed up by Daniel Robbins, who’s written a number of good Linux articles for IBM developerworks. I haven’t checked this one out just yet but I intend to–as big as Sorcerer is, Gentoo’s bigger still, and has been in development longer.
Tinyapps.org is a site dedicated to small, useful programs and utilities, mostly for DOS and Windows. There’s some good stuff there.
I had a couple of other things I’ve been meaning to post but they’ve slipped my mind. So I’m outta here.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.