u   u   S   P   Y

Nifty table of contents type thing:

What is uuSPY?

uuSPY is an idea I had when I was packing up to move to Silicon Valley for a way to keep getting all of my subdomain's mail when I no longer have my BRI and any kind of dedicated internet connection. I found that it was actually useful when I had absolutely no kind of internet connection as well, but we won't get into that.

uuSPY is, of course, just a UUCP service, no big deal, but for spy.net's toasternet-centric environment, it's the perfect solution for people who want to run their own mail, sick of imap/pop, having to pay their provider for extra mailboxes for their cats, or whatever. With uuSPY, you can dial up to your ISP with any type of normal internet service (PPP, SLIP, shell, whatever), and accept your own mail for your entire domain.

How does it work?

UUCP can be configured to not care where you're coming from, so you just make a uucp connection to a known relay, and have all of your mail, etc... handled there. You can make this connection many ways, direct serial, modem, telnet, rlogin, ssh, etc... or direct network uucp, then you authenticate and grab your stuff.

The mail can be delivered to you in several ways. The way I do it is known as uucp-uudom which sends messages via rmail in a way that looks just like SMTP style addresses (otherwise pine gets confused) and can then be redistributed from my network to one of my other machines or whatever.

I.e., you might have an address toilet@bathroom.domain.com that you use to send messages to people sitting on the toilet. Sendmail (per my config) would translate toilet@bathroom.domain.com to uudomain!toilet@bathroom.domain.com and your uucp gateway would get it and should know what to do with that.

What does it cost?

Ideally, I'd like to provide it for free for non-commercial use, allowing for optional donations, of course, and possibly advertising to raise money for hardware and connections.

Please realize that if provided as a free service, we can provide very little support. We can give pointers, and I'll probably be putting up some sample sendmail configs and uucp configs, but beyond that, you're really on your own. We in no way guarantee this service will work for you. If you are having problems for any reason, flakey hardware, bad ISP, or lack of documentation reading, it is not our responsibility. Besides, you'll appreciate doing it on your own. :)

In addition to the above, there will be a terms and conditions, nothing terribly complicated, just things like don't subscribe to the .mov of the day mailing list or whatever (keep disk space usage as minimal as possible).

How do I sign up?

It's not a publically available service right now, but we would like to know if you're interested. Send mail to uuspy@spy.net with questions and/or comments.