It works! I think. Sort of.

And in honour of Matt I'm going to 'fess up and put the posts most of you don't actually want to read in a new 'geek-fu' category ;-)

Couldn't get UW-IMAP to work; the distribution's package seemed to have no configuration available, and although it ought to have done what I needed without it, since it didn't I was kind of stuck. Installed Dovecot for IMAP, which looked like it would be fine, and then I had a Bright Idea and decided to change the mailbox format to Maildir (while I had no mail). Noting that QPopper doesn't support Maildir, I installed Dovecot's POP3 offering.

By this stage I've replaced my broken IMAP server and my inadequate POP3 server. A quick test reveals that - as expected - the removal of QPopper (with its DRAC support) has stopped me relaying SMTP, so I go off and find an alternative. An hour of hacking Perl scripts later, and I'm good to go: mail goes out, and I can contact the server to get it in. (To be fair I would have needed something other than QPopper-DRAC once I was using IMAP anyway, unless I wanted to rig a client to pre-auth with a dummy POP3 request every time I wanted to send).

But it wasn't getting there. At some point during the evening I found a nice test for the domain's DNS settings, and it suggested I put in an SPF record. While playing with the DNS for my domains, I did a little tidying, deleting what appeared to be a duplicate record. Turns out that the wildcard it was duplicating isn't quite wild enough, and the explicit entry was required after all. I put it right and went to sleep.

With the DNS having propagated once more, it all seems fine. I've even put the SPF records back, and will see (after a couple of hours' more propagation) whether the test recognises it.

I'm still a tad concerned about a couple of missing mails. There were two of them in my inbox yesterday; they're not there any more. Hopefully amid the confusion of all the different clients I've been using or testing with during the last day, something hit with a delete-from-server POP3 request while I wasn't looking, but it does look a lot like the mail has just disappeared.

That's not good.