kenswain.com

I am a huge fan of Twitter. I love the whole concept of micro blogging and telling the world what you are doing “right now!” Twitter is pretty straight foreword on the surface. There are some tips that you must take into account to get the most out of this awesome service.So you might be asking what you could use such a service for?  

I use it to keep my friends and family up to date on what is going on. Some use it to advertise new articles they are publishing on their blogs. While still others use it to let people know about parties and events in their town. And you can do all of this from your mobile phone and SMS!

 

Killer party at the Wild Horse tonight               

Twitter supports a feature called direct messaging. This allows you to send text messages to your friends with out having their mobile numbers. All they have to have is a twitter account. 

d friends_name What’s going on dude?                

During the course of the day you might want to answer a tweet or mention some body. To do this you use the “@” symbol followed by there name. This will highlight there name in the web interface and allow others to click to find out more about the person.

Me: Anyone know of a good place to eat?Friend: @me try the old hickory stake house they have good food.                

This should be enough to get you started on twitter. You can always follow me on twitter if you are interested in my exciting life (Yeah right!). My username is Kenotic.

I have been using gmail for my kenswain.com email for a long time now. Once I got my iPhone I grew tired of having the email show up to places and having to mark it read in one. This lead me to use my home desktop, which runs Ubuntu, as an email IMAP email server. The process is much easier then it sounds. I just had to run a few commands and it was up and running.

First there was installing postfix. Postfix is an mail transfer agent (MTA) that is used to deliver email. This is also called an SMTP server after the protocol that it uses to accomplish this task.

ken@desktop: $ sudo apt-get update ken@desktop: $ sudo apt-get install postfix

After that you need to tell postfix to use a maildir. To do this you have to add a line to your /etc/postfix/main.cf.

ken@desktop: $ sudo echo "home_mailbox = Maildir/" >> /etc/postfix/main.cf

Next you need to chose an IMAP server to install. I chose dovecot for its good security record, and ease of configuration.

ken@desktop: $ sudo apt-get install dovecot-imapd

Once you have the install done you need to do some configuration for dovecot to use the correct protocol and also to use maildir. The two place in the file you need to be concerend with in /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf are: protocols = imap imaps mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir

Those are the settings in mine, but make sure to adjust them to how you like.

Now with email access to your box and the ability to send and receive email it is time to get your email from gmail to your local box. You can do this with a product called fetchmail.

ken@desktop: $ sudo apt-get install fetchmail

Now it is time to configure fetchmail to get email automatically. This is a fairly easy process.

ken@desktop: $ sudo vim /etc/fetchmail.rc

and add

set daemon 15 set syslog set postmaster localuser

poll pop.gmail.com with proto POP3 and options no dns user 'someone@gmail.com' with pass "password" is 'localuser' here options ssl smtphost localhost

Once that is done you need to enable the fetchmail daemon to start. To do this just edit /etc/default/fetchmail and change

START_DAEMON=no to START_DAEMON=yes

Once that is done just start the fetchmail service and you are good to go. Open the imap port on your router and change your email account in mail.app and resync your phone and you should be ready to enjoy Email goodness.