One-click deployment of your own mail server and personal cloud (so to speak).
This draws heavily on Sovereign by Alex Payne (https://github.com/al3x/sovereign) and the "NSA-proof your email in 2 hours" blog post by Drew Crawford (http://sealedabstract.com/code/nsa-proof-your-e-mail-in-2-hours/).
Amazon's EC2 isn't a great place to host a mail server. Do you still need to request permission to send email first? And you don't know if you'll get an IP address with a bad reputation from its previous owner. But it makes deployment easy, so it may at least be useful for testing.
Create an Access Key at https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/home?#security_credential. Download the key and save the information somewhere secure.
Set up your environment and paste in the two parts of your access key that you just downloaded:
sudo apt-get install ec2-api-tools
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY=your_access_key_id
export AWS_SECRET_KEY=your_secret_key
export EC2_URL=ec2.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
export AWS_AZ=us-east-1a
The first time around, create a new volume (disk drive) to store your stuff.
source ec2/new_volume.sh
If you want to reuse an existing volume:
export VOLUME_ID=...your existing volume id...
Here we're using the Ubuntu 13.04 amd64 instance-store-backed AMI in the us-east region. You can select another at http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/locator/ec2/.
Generate a new "keypair" (if you don't have one) that will let you SSH into your machine after you start it:
ec2addkey mykey > mykey.pem
chmod go-rw mykey.pem
Then launch a new instance. We're creating a m1.small instance --- it's the smallest instance that can use an instance-store-backed AMI. So charges will start to apply.
