I just got back from a week in Scotland, working hard at visiting a few distilleries. However, the week before I left was somewhat more eventful, from a work perspective.

Some background. Back in February of 2005, when I was still part of Goats, we moved to new servers hosted by voxel. All has been well and good, and they continue to be an amazing company. I recommend them to anyone, primarily because they're the first hosting company I've dealt with that doesn't treat me like a idiot... which may or may not be a mistake on their part.

When we moved over, our machines were put in a hosting facility in Parsippany, NJ. After taking on Real Life Comics as my first non-Goats client, I had to expand my server pool. The new servers were in a facility in NYC. I moved over the database and the web severs, but since setting up a high quality email solution is such a pain in the ass, I left that on the old machine.

Unfortunately, they were closing their Parsippany location at the end of August, and losing the machines in it. So while I got a much better machine for a much cheaper dollar price in exchange, the "real" price was that I had to re-set up the mail server.

Since I (for now) remain a qmail fan, I started with the directions at qmailrocks.org. However, since:

1. the directionds and dowload havn't been updated since early 2006
2. I've learned a thing or two (barely) since then

I also supplemented it with newer versions of almost every piece of software mentioned, and used the excellent information available at John Simpson's qmail site.

I hate messing with the mail server, because there's so many independent pieces that are supposed to work together, from the various pieces of qmail (including config files for all the various patches and enhancements like validrcptto and rblsmtpd), to getting SpamAssassin and ClamAV scanning incoming messages, to getting SSL/TLS version of SMTP, POP and IMAP all working, to having some sort of functional webmail client in place.

Having finally gotten all this working, I promptly jumped on a plane to Glasgow, hoping for the best, or at least a somewhat functional internet connection. Luckily, I had the latter; so all seems to be working pretty well right now.