I've been running my own e-mail server since the mid '80s. The relatively simple server for just me got more complex when Carol and I got serious and I set up an account for her to also receive email.

It got more complex when we went independant and the server was handling email for cflynt.com and noucorp.com.

The real complexity came when Google and Yahoo decided to come up with ways to make email more secure and get rid of spammers. Rather than stop giving out email addresses to anyone who asked for one, they came up with convoluted techniques for cryptographic checksums and customized DNS entries.

Cryptography is one of those things that changes every few years. Each year, there's more understanding of how to break ciphers and more computing power to use to break them. The "Unbreakable Code" of the 1800s is trivial to break today. The German Enigma engine from WWII is as secure as my Captain Midnight Secret Decoder Ring.

So, when Google and Yahoo decided to use the State Of The Art encryption tools some ten years ago, it was a given that they'd be obsolete and useless sooner rather than later.

The mail server I set up eight years ago uses technology that's been obsolete for several years, and the big boys (Google and Yahoo) are starting to insist that I use today's crypto keys, not the ones that were strong eight years ago.

So, of all sad words of tongue and keyboard, the scariest are "I really need to upgrade."

I started this task last weekend. It took an afternoon to install the operating system on the new hardware for a new mail server, and another day to get all the fiddly bits happy with each other.

Then another day or so to upgrade all the cryptographic fiddly bits to Google's new standards.

At that point, my email server could talk to the outside world, and the various validation sites thought it was doing what it was supposed to.

However, the new email server refused to talk to the old computer where I read mail. That machine was also 8 years old, and couldn't offer the new, secure ciphers.

After a few days of failing to convince the old system to use new ciphers and failing to convince the new system to accept the obsolete, insecure encryption, I gave up and built a new file server.

Again, this was a relatively short task. Except that I had to move about a terabyte and a half of data from the old server to the new one. (This was also a good time to replace the old expensive and huge one terabyte drives with new cheap and tiny three terabyte drives.)

The data transfer took a couple days, even with gigabyte ethernet.

And, of course, then there's all the fiddly bits. Like Microsoft, the Linux developers like to change things for no good reason, so the configuration that worked some ten years ago is just plain wrong now.

So, back in the 1970s, the computer folks at Berkeley wrote a trivial email program, designed to be used on teletypes and such.

Fast forward some 25 years, and I got a contract to develop an email handling application. Having heard about issues with trying to work directly with the Unix/Linux email files, I wrote a program that used the venerable Berkeley email program to read the emails and then my program decided what to do with them.

Fast forward another five years, and I was getting too much mail to handle, so I tweaked my email handler to be an email sorter and added a GUI to select what set of mail I wanted to read.

I've been using that program for about 20 years, since long before Google existed.

In all that time, the old Berkeley email program has behaved just the same, and my program has just worked.

In the newest Ubuntu, they've "adapted" and "updated" the old email program. To quote the blurb, the new mailer "resembles the original."

About the same way I resemble I-94.

They changed the prompts, the informational messages, the layout of the output and how text is presented. About the only thing that's like the original is that the messages are identified by number.

Needless to say, the program that's been one of my staples for longer than these programmers have been alive is not working.

Count the number of happy people in my house. You won't need even one finger. (I won't mention which finger I'm using.)

I spent several hours reworking my program, trying to rebuild an older version of the mail program that works "right" and mostly getting frustrated.

Eventually, I rethought things and realized that some of the constraints that apply to things like procmail don't apply to my application, so I reworked it to work directly from the mail files.