initial commit of some preliminary notes

README.md

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+Mail in a Box
+=============
+
+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/).
+
+Deploying to EC2 from the command line
+--------------------------------------
+
+Sign up for Amazon Web Services.
+
+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.
+
+	source ec2/start_instance.sh
+
+It will wait until the instance is available.
+	
+Log in:
+
+	ssh -i mykey.pem ubuntu@$INSTANCE_IP
+
+Set up:
+
+	
+	logout
+
+Terminate your instance with:
+
+	ec2-terminate-instances $INSTANCE
+
+