It seems this is becoming a bit of a hobby of mine. No sooner has my email account settled, and along I come and decide to move it all to another place…
Now this whole process is getting a little bit easier. You see, all my wife’s and my email sits on an internal mail server. This allows me to get to that all important email from my god-daughter’s sister’s nanny’s post man from 3 years ago that I thought I’d lost - even when the ADSL line goes down. It also means that I don’t have 100Mb of mail to transfer every time I move email host - it’s all on the internal server.
Down side is I’m on a dynamic IP, and while this doesn’t present a problem for hosting web sites (use dyndns.org and create a CNAME record to that address for any other domain, for example) MX records don’t like pointing to CNAME records. In layman’s terms, you can’t direct email to a dynamic IP - easily.
So I host my email on an external server, and poll it regularly. Personally I go for once a minute. Every minute, my internal mail server check the external “official” mail server if there’s any new email, and if so, sucks it down.
Now that’s all grand, and I can get to my mail internally, but now I can’t get to it from anywhere else. Or can I? I’ve simply routed port 943 (IMAP over SSL) from the router to this machine, so I can connect from anywhere (net-enabled) in the world. Just need an IMAP client. And if all else fails, I can even use web2mail.com.
So there we have it. Easily movable email, and yet it’s always in the same place. Now I just have to perfect that backup system and … oh yeah - reason for post: I’m moving my email to another server, so bear with me if it goes down temporarily…
Now as for my web site - well you now know that this exists. I’m still planning on moving my photo albums back internally and will let you all know when it’s moved.
Time for bed.
Benji