[geeks] Q: How to set up "private" Presto email service?

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Jonathan Katz <jon at jonworld.com>
>Date: 2007/10/18 Thu PM 02:00:24 CDT
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] Q: How to set up "private" Presto email service?

>Why does CUPS over UUCP come to mind? LOL...
>
>The e-mail is received by a specific alias and is then decoded to a
>specific, dummy (date/time-based?) filename. That filename is spooled in a
>directory. Another box comes in, scans the directory and downloads the
>contents (zmodem?)
>
>It would be easier w/o POTS.. .just have a cronjob that does it all?

Well, the idea is to provide one-way (incoming) email access to my folks (they had an iOpener, that got too old to continue using), then we tried a laptop, but it got crapified *immediately* and my folks were, honestly, afraid of breaking something. Now I want to drop a small box in their den, and have it print out emails sent to them.

W/O POTS is not an option, as they don't have an ISP - you could say I'm trying to avoid the $10/month fee (I think $120 for the printer is quite reasonable, but it won't work without the monthly service).

The part I want to "create" is the client (the printer component) with a headless PC & UPS w/ automatic graceful shutdown when the power goes out.

I'm envisioning a headless SFF PC running *nix, and procmail ingesting the incoming email and sending email (and attachments) to a local printer after matching the "From:" header to a known list of senders (kids, others).

It would be great if I could just set up the PC with Outlook, have the PC poll my server once a day (at night, lower phone costs), and configure Outlook to print out each email as it arrives, but that doesn't seem to be an option...

Lionel