My Linux server crashed recently. It happened when the electric company had a planned service day. I forgot to power down the machine and when I brought it back up the filesystem was toast.

I decided to wipe it and start over. I wanted to try using the Netatalk packaged by the Debian project instead of the the hand build version I was running.

So after some fits and starts I finally have Debian 7 (Test) running with Netatalk serving my Time Machine shares.

But now it was time to install Popfile so I could filter and talk to the gmail servers.

The email client I use is MacSOUP. I love it. But it doesn’t talk POP3S. So I need a proxy to get my email from Gmail. But the Debian Popfile package is currently unavaiable for 7.x (Test). So I went looking for an alternative POP proxy package.

I found Perdition. I tried and failed to configure it for my needs. Then I found Stunnel. This was much eiaser to set up. All was good.

But after a day of using it I decided that running Stunnel on my server was over kill. I should be able to run it on my client machine (Max OS X) as a user process. So I decided to set up Stunnel under Launch Agent.

On Mac OS X the Launch Agent service (part of launchd) is what you can use to start programs when a user logs in. So I downloaded the latest version of Stunnel (stunnel-4.53) configures and compiled it.

Then I took the exectuable and placed it in ~/bin. I created a .conf file, a .pem file and a .plist. I put them all in the right place and now I can get my email without my server running. This should encourage me to turn it off every now and then.