Tips

As part of a PHP web app I developed, I needed to authenticate the web client user with a remote system. Unfortunately, this system was a mainframe and setting up a web-enabled authentication product on it was somewhat timeconsuming and required a lot of administrivia. I wanted to avoid all that, so I had to come up with another way to authenticate web users remotely.

A while back, I switched ISPs and lost the multiple email addresses that the old ISP provided. With the new ISP, my wife and I were restricted to sharing a single public email address. With fetchmail, I could retrieve our email from my ISP's POP3 server and store it in our lan server for on-demand "offline" reading, but with one email address, either my wife and I had to read each other's mail, or one of us got no mail at all.