[Discuss] Running a mail server, or not

[dbarrett at blazemonger.com (Daniel Barrett)]

Here's what I do (for my personal use). It doesn't involve running a
mail server in any significant way, and you get all the power of
procmail, spamassassin, etc.

1. Rent an IMAP account on any third-party server that comes with the
capability to send and receive mail. (I use hostdime.com.)  Call it
server S.

2. Set up postfix at home simply to route all outgoing email through
server S.

3. For reading mail, run fetchmail(1) from my home Linux box to grab
the email from server S regularly (via cron), with a simple
~/.fetchmailrc like:

poll mail.whatever.com with proto IMAP:
  user "me at example.com" password "xxx"
  ssl;
  stripcr;
  fetchall;
  nokeep;

The fetched mail passes through my local procmail recipes,
spamassassin filtering, etc. with no problem. The email is then stored
on my home computer where my local mail client can read it.

Advantages: No maintenance of an email server. Easy remote reading of
email by SSH-ing into my home Linux box.

Disadvantages: Gmail users shake their heads and wonder why I don't
just read/send mail in the cloud.

The above setup has worked for over 10 years.

--
Dan Barrett
dbarrett at blazemonger.com