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Thursday 17 December 2015

Pi 2

I've been using a Raspberry Pi for email processing. I like using Pis for this sort of small job, they're low power and take up little space.

I have a computer that accesses all the different places that I get mail sent to - for example, I still have an AOL address! It's free, so there's no real point in cancelling it. The Pi uses fetchmail to pick up the email from these various places (using IMAP). Then it runs all the email through the spam filter I wrote (described elsewhere in this blog). Finally it sorts it into alphabetical order (I find that a lot more convenient than date order) and then I use alpine (a clone of pine) to read it. I use pine because it isn't accessed via a browser. It just shows me the text. This means that A) any malicious stuff that a browser would respond to, just doesn't happen, and B) the little invisible things that tell the sender that the email has been opened by a browser, don't work.

But sometimes I get such a flood of email that the Pi has trouble keeping up. That would happen if, for example, something goes horribly wrong with my comms, and I start getting 20 alerts per minute telling me that my servers can't be contacted.

Also, some emails need a lot of processing; for example when there's a lot of attachments (and sometimes I do want to look at attachments).

So I've replaced the Pi with a Pi 2, with twice as much memory and (according to what I've read) six times the processing speed.

It would have been nice to just take out the SD card from the Pi and put it in the Pi 2, but the Pi uses a full size SD card, and the Pi 2 uses a teeny tiny SD card. So I had to load the new card up with all the necessary processing software, which wasn't too bad.

apt-get --assume-yes install sendmail
apt-get --assume-yes install dcfldd
apt-get --assume-yes install rdate
apt-get --assume-yes install vsftpd
apt-get --assume-yes install samba
apt-get --assume-yes install samba-common-bin
apt-get --assume-yes install rsync
apt-get --assume-yes install espeak
apt-get --assume-yes install sox
apt-get --assume-yes install alpine
apt-get --assume-yes install fetchmail
apt-get --assume-yes install nfs-kernel-server nfs-common rpcbind
apt-get --assume-yes install apache2  
apt-get --assume-yes install bind9  bind9utils dnsutils
apt-get --assume-yes install dnsmasq
apt-get --assume-yes install lighttpd

And then LockFile-Simple-0.208.tar.gz  Mail-Procmail-1.08.tar.gz  MailTools-2.12.tar.gz

Also perl5/URI, perl5/Lingua, lame and mary (for text-to-speech)

It's all working fine.

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