Episode: 1571
Title: HPR1571: Yahoo Mail Forwarder
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1571/hpr1571.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 05:11:36

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Hey, this is Tojette, calling in for another installment on HackerPublic.com.
My first installment was a few months ago about building a Android device that was pretty much
Google-free. As a quick update on that, I've been running that tablet now for a while without
issue and I went ahead and took my Nexus 7 and did the similar thing to the Nexus 7.
I now have a Nexus 7 that I use regularly that has no Google account and it works fine.
A lot of the apps I'm using are being used from F-Groid, which is a nice open source repository
that doesn't require account. Well, in that podcast, I had also
mentioned the fact that I had a couple other things configured and one of them was consolidating
my mail. One of the applications I was doing there was a mail folder for Yahoo.
I had gone through an effort of trying to consolidate emails. Most of you probably have about
a dozen different emails and for the longest time, my routine was to check this one,
check that one, check the other one, and it's been half a day just checking your email.
Didn't like that, so I started consolidating. I had my own personal server,
which I liked and I controlled things on, so I set up stuff on my personal server with the
email account I like. I took my Gmail account forwarded over, that was nice and easy.
I took a lot of my other accounts that I had and I set up folders on them to go in there,
but I could not do that with Yahoo. But I did find that when I was using Thunderbird,
that Thunderbird, you can go ahead and open up and deal with my Yahoo account on as if it was
a local mail account. I thought, hmm, this seems nice. I wonder if I could do something with this
to make them more useful. So, here's what I ended up doing. I built a virtual machine that
takes my Yahoo mail and we'll grab that, put it into my personal account, and so then I only
have to deal with my personal account, and even though it's getting mail from all the different places.
This is a nice solution, it's nice and simple, but I wanted something that was going to be
forget about it. I don't like messing with stuff all the time. I wanted to mess with it once,
get it up and running, and then forget about it. So, here's how the virtual machine was built.
To build it, you're going to need a couple of basic things. Your Yahoo account,
your second email account, the second email account that you're forwarding things to,
must have iMap access. You'll need your virtual server to host this. You will need a virtual box
installed on your local machine to build the image for it, and you'll need an ISO file for
the Linux distro you're going to use. In this case, I was using the LXDE version of
Fedora20. Start out with, build a basic virtual machine. Go ahead and configure the new virtual
machine. Told it was Fedora, gave it half a gig of RAM. I had plenty of memory on my storage,
but I figured it's not going to need much memory. So, half a gig was sufficient. I gave it a 20 gig
hard drive dynamic, so it will expand to whatever size it's needed. If you want to make it bigger,
find that's entirely up to you, and build the basic machine. Once that's done, I start out my virtual
machine, log in. Being a good person, I go ahead and do all the updates that I'm supposed to do
on there, get everything up today, and then I install Thunderbird. Once Thunderbirds installed,
you go in and configure two male accounts, the first one being your Yahoo male account,
and when you're configuring your Yahoo male account, it'll give you the option of
pop access or iMap access. Choose the iMap access. That's important. Otherwise, what will happen if
it's pop access? It'll be deleting stuff or moving stuff over, but leaving copies there on the
Yahoo side. When that one's done, you configure your second account. The second account is going to be
iMap access as well. Great, you've got Thunderbird running now, then your virtual machine, you've got
two female accounts configured, and you need to create a rule. What I did is I didn't want all the
messages from my Yahoo account just being jammed into the main folder with my regular account.
So under my secondary account there, I created a subfolder under the inbox called Yahoo.
I then set up a rule from Yahoo that says any new message that comes in,
automatically move it into the Yahoo folder of my secondary account.
Told it to run immediately after I was done, and it took all my current male and Yahoo,
and it moved it into my iMap account under my secondary account, and it took it a while to run,
because it's taken all those emails. Yes, those ones you forgot about that were still sitting in
there. All those emails and move them over into the Yahoo folder. Great, we got a running system,
but we want this to be automated and not have to worry about it.
I then go through and configure the LXT automatically run Thunderbird on startup.
I also configured the user account that I'm using for this to have no password. Yes,
no password, no, no, no, no, no, freak out. This is a virtual machine that's running on a
private network that has no internal access from any place. It's hosted on my virtual server,
but it's netted on there. It doesn't even, it isn't even directly accessible from other
machines on my own network, only from the server. So I figured password security is not that important.
Configured the Thunderbird or those automatically start up when it boots up,
and then I decided I don't want to have to do patches and updates for this. I just want to
forget about this. So I set up a cron job with two different tasks. The first task is a cron job
on Sunday mornings at midnight that goes ahead and does all current updates from the repository.
The second update is an hour later and what that does is a reboot some machine because there may
have been a hurdle to update or something else in there. I thought about getting fancy to try to
determine whether I needed to reboot or not, but it's like me. I don't want to worry about it,
and this is a simple machine. Great. So my machines configured to auto-boot, auto-log in, my user,
it's automatically running Thunderbird on startup, and it's got all its maintenance there. I shut
the machine down, boot it back up again, just to make sure everything's working good. I've got it
done right. Now shut it down. I'm still on my desktop. I export that virtual image I just
built, which also gives me a backup copy in case something goes wrong. I take that virtual image
I just built, exported to an OVF file. The OVF file is copied over to the server and then imported
into the PHP VirtualBox running on the server. Now that it's up and running on PHP VirtualBox,
I start off the application and it just runs. I forget about it. Don't have to worry about it
anymore. You'll know it's working because it will take all your Yahoo mails as they're coming in
as soon as it detects them and moves them over so they'll automatically appear in your radar count.
There may be a little bit of buffer delay, but I was finding that Yahoo was already buffering things
and I did sometimes have to wait a couple hours for email coming in. That's why I put using that as
a primary. You now have a working machine with everything that you need on there. I've got more
details of the actual steps with some step-by-step walkthrough on it on my website at james.tobusacademy.com.
That's J-A-M-E-S-D-O-E-B-E-S-A-C-A-D-E-M-Y.com. Go there, check it out. Check out some of the other
things I've posted there as well. I've got a few other things I want to put in future episodes and
would love feedback if anybody finds these useful or not. Thanks. Bye. Hey, please excuse some of
the quality of the recording it was done while I was driving, finally getting a chance to get it done.
Also, I wanted to note that there is an issue I was having with the
mail for it or if anybody has a suggestion on how to resolve it. The problem running into is
sometimes when it starts up, it'll grab everything that's in the spam folder and go ahead and
forward it over to the new folder. It doesn't happen all the time and it's not consistent, but if
somebody's got some ideas on that, let me know. Thanks.
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