aq.org upgrade status report
Hi. The aq.org upgrade is partly complete (after lots and lots of debugging). The web sites are not back up except for www.aq.org itself; I’m going to work on that when I’ve gotten some sleep.

Mail is back up, and if you read and send your mail with pine, or just forward your aq.org mail to another address and read it there, you’re all set and you don’t need to read the rest of this.

If you read your mail via IMAP, the switch to a different piece of IMAP server software is going to cause some changes:

• The new IMAP mail server requires all your mail folders to be in the directory Mail in your home directory. If this is not already the case, it will look like most of your mail folders (except your inbox) are missing. If you’re comfortable connecting to aq.org via SSH and moving your mail folders into a Mail directory on the command line, you can do that and they should show up. Otherwise, let me know and I’ll move them for you. It will help me if you tell me what the names of your mail folders are.


• You’ll get a message about a bogus “random103” security certificate when you connect. I’ll fix that when I get a chance, but in the meantime, just accept the certificate.


• Unfortunately, information about which messages have been seen has been lost; I believe everything will appear unread again. (That doesn’t seem to be the case.) Also, with some mail clients, if you have deleted messages but not purged them, they might show up again.


• You might need to make some configuration changes in order to connect at all, because he old IMAP server did not support encryption, but the new one requires it. (This is for receiving email via IMAP, not sending it.) If your mail client was configured just to do whatever the server wanted, then you may not need to make changes, but if you can’t connect, turn on TLS encryption. If you have trouble with that, let me know what mail program you use to connect and I may be able to help.


• You should probably turn off the option to show only subscribed folders if you have it turned on. (That option is probably in the same place where you specify your IMAP server; in some mail clients you need to click an “Advanced” button to get to it.)

For outgoing mail, right now you don’t need to make any changes to your mail configuration, but you are very likely to need my manual intervention in order to send mail to non-aq.org addresses. More detail when I’m awake again, but for now if you get a “relaying denied” message when trying to send to non-aq.org addresses, call me. (Basically, I need to add the IP address you’re sending from to a config file. If you’re hrafn or sionnagh, that’s probably already been done.) I’m going to change things in a few days or a week or so such that you just authenticate with your name and password to send mail, the same as you do to read mail, but it will take me a little while to get to that.


Very sorry about all the hassle!