I have been thinking about calling TW and getting a static IP setup at my house.
I would like to run eGroupWare and setup a central email and calendaring solution at home.
I am sick of using Gmail. I do NOT like their IMAP implementation. The idea of flags just doesn’t work for using seperate mail client.
Anyways, if you run your own mail server, what do you use? What are your thoughts on it? Does it take a lot of maintenance? What is your back-up plan? etc…
I only touched it when setting it up. Haven’t needed to touch it again, save for some filter settings and such. I was even able to set up a discussion list.
I use dreamhost.
edit: I guess I should say I can use as webmail or through outlook, as POP3 or IMAP.
It’s slower than gmail when going to my phone, but other than that, I haven’t had any issues in 3-4 years…
It’s always nice to have a different email than @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, etc.
I would look at this from a cost perspective, cost of hardware, increased electricity, and all that good stuff, if you are running just a simple mail server just throw your business to a managed service company in a colo and probably save yourself time and money.
I like the idea of eGroupWare, with IMAP being powered by Postfix.
I don’t really know a whole lot about DNS, I will be back with those questions though.
cost of hardware? Zero, I have a box to run it on. Increased electricity? Already running this box, it sits IDLE for 100% of most days. It is a media box and only gets used for movies/downloaded shows and online streaming. It’s sad, but it’s a very capable box with a good CPU, great cooling, 4 GB ram, and a 1.5TB hdd.
I don’t forsee a mail server with two personal accounts to chew up a lot of resources. I maybe get 10 emails per hour at the BUSIEST times. SPAM is usually low. But the spam protection will probably chew the most resources. Hopefully in the future, I will get a mac mini or a dell studio to use for the media box, and then dedicate this to being a server.
Reliability shouldn’t be bad either. And actually, what I MIGHT do, is setup a backend filter to forward all mail to my gmail.com account. That way if I have outages, or if a drive dies, my losses will be minimal.
For backups, I will probably do them onto DVDs or something, and store them in a locked drawer at work. Off-Site ftw.
My biggest worry is SPAM really. Is it a lot of work to maintain the spam protection? Or is it a one-time kind of thing? Is SPAM Assassin enough protection?
Spam assassin is good…Just utilize RBL block lists and basic features of the software.
clamd + spamassassin are what a lot commercial spam filters are based off of…
Edit: For reverse DNS I assume you have a domain? So you have XYZ.com you would make an MX record for it say mail.xyz.com create an A record for mail.xyz.com = XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX then call Timewarner or whoever your ISP is ask for a reverse DNS record for IP to be mail.xyz.com.
Their imap implementation works fine with Evolution (linux), Mail.app, and my iphone’s mail program. And I still use my own squirrelmail install as my webmail client, just using gmail’s imap backend instead of my own. I don’t use windows, so can’t speak for that platform.
I ran my own smtp/imap server for about seven years and finally decided two years ago that with gmail for domains available for free, maintaining a personal mail server just didn’t make sense anymore.
Ok firstly, do yourself a favor and slap your head for even considering egroupware, manage a production instance here at work and my god is it fucking horrible. It is worse since the asshat who built it used qmail, my distaste and hatred of qmail is undescribable.
If you really want a groupware solution that doesn’t suck use Zimbra Community Edition.