About

I studied Music and English at UofQ in the mid 1970’s. In the early 1980’s, design and architecture. In the 1990’s a Graduate Diploma in Computing Science at QUT.

In the 80’s I looked at a smaller PDP mainframe, I printed and studied all the hex code of the Apple PC and wrote bits and pieces. I received a grant for writing a perspective generating program for simple housing structures. I wrote a Pascal program to calculate heat/cold of housing with the guidance of a more than well regarded professor.

I managed and developed a CAAD graphics system for an architectural firm in Brisbane, after having used that system on the Gold Coast.

I wanted to move into computer IT which took me to Sydney where I did any and everything IT did in the early 1990s – modems, routers, soldering, printers, terminals, software, operating systems – covering all sorts of industry segments. OS covered many types of Unix – e.g. DEC, HP, SCO, SUN, IBM, and some Wang mainframe.

I moved into specific roles in IBM Australia & Global Services. This included some main frame, mid-range, and mostly AIX Unix + early Red Hat Linux, and various types of software. This involved access to developers and documents in USA, the Printing Systems Division and the On-Demand software used by Banks, and then to a public company. All this developed disciplines, in-country specialisation, overseas contacts,  project delivery skills, analysis and solutions architecture as recognised by IBM in USA, industry and business best practice, communications with many people’s jobs from shop floor to CEO’s, and ASX listed companies.

In 2010 I was gravely ill – still working with the condition today. I lost my job and career, then to distract from threatening pain, I focused on WordPress and Amazon Linux, and some photography to places I regularly went to, such as St Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney. I have used many 3rd party hosting providers, understanding issues myself and others have had over a span of years.

No configurations for Email

This site does not include email packages such as Axigen, Dovecot,  iRedmail and so on, or web clients like Roundcube.

If you wish to explore building an email server, it could take several months and no good outcome. You would need to open ports required for email in a local region through an AWS out of sandbox request for your region, then open imap/s & smtp/d ports in a Security Group – e.g. port 465,587, 143, 993, 25 then test on the DNS Checker website the ports are open.

Email servers use more memory than WordPress, so on a small EC2 instance you can easily use 400MB on swap space. The system would suffer badly on performance or freeze.

If you have to alter domain names and mail domains in /etc/hostname and /etc/hosts,  an EC2 instance can be unusable. Again, no documentation or even forum help on several critical problems like this. The installation instructions are based on assumptions and have been for previous OS versions, hence do not work.

There is very little information on the various email system configurations. There may be syntax documents. It is grossly disappointing if you try to invest time and have no satisfaction with a good outcome.

As a big red flag, I would ask why one package uses self-signed SSL certificates from China.

The risks to your important emails are so high, from my experience, as to leave this pursuit. For instance, upgrade issues, mailbox folder failures, database corruption and how to fix, managing users, and so on. I have spent 4 years on these products.

The cost of an EC2 email server instance is minimally twice as much as any reputable service like MS Exchange.

My summary – Email is nasty and complicated beyond anything reasonable. There may be companies who wish to delve into all this, but they have money and an IT team. Email itself is a bad legacy yet still in use today. It needs a total rebuild, not based on the way mime content is constructed today.

As an example, some specialised companies try their best to add functionality.  The problem is still how they can or cannot edit the email’s raw data. Sometimes this is ugly. Even when trying to detect hidden spam or phishing, they may claim to offer such features but not mention they can'[t do it for base64 content. Some features sound good, but in practice are highly limited due to the constructs of email itself.

These are my views.