Daily Cup of Tech

In case you are new to DCoT or just haven’t noticed, I’m a bit of a USB drive nut. I like what they can do and the freedom that they give me. I have started making different USB “systems” and my latest is a complete e-mail system on one USB drive. Build a USB Drive Mail System has a fully functioning mail client along with its own SMTP mail server. This will allow you to carry all your e-mails, contacts, RSS feeds, etc. with you and also let you send e-mails without having to worry about whether or not your internet provider will let you connect from outside their network.

The other nice thing about this system is that everything is available for free!

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12 Responses to “Portable Mail System (USB Drive, Of Course)”

1. Austin Meyer Says:
   November 2nd, 2006 at 12:41 am

   I downloaded the linked programs, they all downloaded perfectly, but when I extracted them directly to the root of a thumb drive it wouldn’t work; when the thumb drive was plugged back in the auto-play worked fine, the problem was it would flash an icon in the program bar at the bottom right (barely starting, then immediately shutting down). I thought maybe there was an order the programs needed to be extracted in, but that wasn’t it either. It ended up when it was extracted the minirelay app didn’t extract into the ‘minirelay’ folder, it extracted into the root directory on the thumb drive, leaving the minirelay folder empty; once placed in the correct folder, it ran perfectly. I have a macbook pro as my primary computer, I created the whole setup on that computer (obviously booted in windows) so that shouldn’t be any problem. Thanks for the how-to, I love the how-to’s for thumb drives. Sorry about any typos.

2. Fred Says:
   November 6th, 2006 at 12:41 pm

   I already use Thunderbird on a U3 enabled USB drive and have been longing for an answer to the SMTP issue as I travel about. I downloaded all the files you show and unzipped them into the existing Thunderbird directory in the System/Apps folder. Since I don’t need the autorun feature (I use XTraveler to launch non-U3 programs) I am not sure how to properly launch everything. Any tips?

   Thanks!
   Fred

3. Tim Fehlman Says:
   November 6th, 2006 at 12:48 pm

   Fred,
   All you would do is have XTraveler launch the Thunderbird Portable and miniRelay applications. This should do the trick for you.

   Tim

4. Fred Says:
   November 6th, 2006 at 1:22 pm

   Tim,

   Thanks for the quick reply! I launched miniRelay, then Thunderbird. I created a new Outgoing Server called localhost. I then sent an email from one of my accounts to another one of my accounts. It left the Outbox nicely, but I didn’t receive the message in my recipient account. Here is an excerpt from the miniRelay log:

   Connection reset by peer.
   13:19:18 [1] Connected with mail.recipientdomain.net
   13:19:39 [1] Error Socket Error # 10054

   I am behind a corporate firewall with Port 25 blocked - probably the culprit?

5. Tim Fehlman Says:
   November 6th, 2006 at 2:13 pm

   90% of the errors that come up from miniRelay are because of tight corporate network settings. I would have to agree that this is probably the case.

   Tim

6. Fred Says:
   November 6th, 2006 at 2:20 pm

   …and I actually had hopes of being able to use a “portable” SMTP client to get around that limitation. I’m still learning about this, and I imagine I’ll find that there won’t be a way around it…

   Thanks, Tim.
   FRed

7. Tim Fehlman Says:
   November 6th, 2006 at 2:24 pm

   Some people have suggested using the Gmail SMTP service. You may want to look at this as an option.

   Tim

8. Fred Says:
   November 6th, 2006 at 5:27 pm

   Yeah, I have tried this: smtp.google.com and smtp.gmail.com on Port 465 with TLS enabled. We’ve got a brick wall firewall here apparently.

9. ThomasT Says:
   November 7th, 2006 at 12:17 am

   Google help suggests trying port 587:

   http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=13292&topic=1557

   On the full post, I also suggested using a paid authenticated SMTP service like DynDNS’s MailHop Outbound. Their servers listen on ports 25, 2525, and 10025. They have a 15-day refund policy, so if none of those ports work, you can get your $$ back.

10. Mark Hartmann Says:
    April 12th, 2007 at 2:55 pm

    Hi,
    I’m a pen tester and I’m trying to get thunderbird to automatically send a prestaged email without user intervention. there appear to be settings in thunderbird to send email automatically at startup but it always brings up the box and asks.

    Any idea’s?

11. Portable Mail System (USB Drive, Of Course) | Daily Cup of Tech Says:
    August 14th, 2007 at 7:20 pm

    […] Portable Mail System (USB Drive, Of Course)Trackback or E-Mail This Post Categories: Internet, Open Source, USB, System Administration, From the Files of DCOT…, Weekend Computer Project, HowTo, Networking Posted on Tuesday, October 31, 2006 by Tim Fehlman   Thanks for visiting Daily Cup of Tech! Here are a few things that you may want to do while you are visiting: […]

12. eduardo palacio Says:
    April 1st, 2008 at 8:25 pm

    avast is reporting dragonmailbomb virus in minirelay
    how do we go around this?

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