The Vast Conundrum

An upgrade from the recently installed Dovecot 1.3 to 2.0 in Debian was started at about midnight. It finished at about 5 AM. This is the sort of thing that might tempt me to let Google handle my mail, if I weren’t so spectacularly unimpressed by Gmail and Gmail for Domains. I seem to value not-using-crap more than privacy I guess, but I think it’s because you can’t be an island of privacy in a sea of people who are broadcasting everything they know about you.

My last mail server appears to have been nearly 9 years old. With a little luck, I won’t be doing this again anytime soon. The whole upgrade was sloppy, from the upstream down to the distro packages which dropped dependencies like MySQL (dovecot-mysql not being installed when MySQL had been in use previously) during the changeover. The one thing nobody will tolerate anymore is mail downtime, and although all the issues were minor, it took hours to sort it all out.