I finished restoring the mail queues from the mail store drive a few minutes ago. Akara is now fully operational. If you need your passwords re-set, contact me via the usual channels. I'm going to write up the tricks I've picked up along the way in a later post.

Your accounts have been recreated so that e-mail can stop bouncing and be delivered. I won't be able to restore your old mail until tomorrow because it'll mean taking Akara offline for a while to keep from hosing the mailstore. You won't be able to log in until I re-set your passwords - contact me via encrypted mail at my personal address or hit me on one of the instant messenger networks and I'll get you hooked up.

Thanks to Lyssa and a quick run to Micro Center on Monday night, I had enough parts to put together a new mail server who seems to want to be named Akara. I'm not sure if Akara is male or female, but Akara is busily processing the backload of SMTP attempts that have piled up since Monday. I'm going to let her burn in overnight and then tomorrow I'll connect the drive that contains the original mailstore and start reconstructing accounts.

The magick smoke got out of Lucien this afternoon. I'm going to start constructing a new mail server tonight once I find a new chassis and ATX power supply (500 watts or more).

I'm going to try to recover everything that I possibly can; if you've got secondary e-mail, use it until further notice.

Greylisting is a technique for slowing down the oncoming torrent of spam on the Net today by breaking spamware that isn't compliant with the SMTP RFCs. It consists of a simple alteration to your DNS zonefiles that places an IP address that doesn't have anything listening on port 25/TCP in the position of your primary MX, and the addresses of your real MX's in positions of lower priority in you DNS zone. Spamware that isn't compliant looks at your DNS records for the IP address of the primary MX, tries to contact it, fails, and gives up, or at …

The tcp.smtp file I use on my mail server for spamblocking.