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> I was really curious to know, though, what other people did with their > email... what do you do with yours? I forward all of my mail to a single address. At the moment, I'm using my ATT Broadband account. I prefer to have this single address be an external mail server (e.g., not one running in my house), for reasons of reliability and convenience (I don't want mail to start bouncing if I'm fiddling with system configurations, and I don't want to lose remote access due to a power failure, system crash, etc). However, since I want to be able to read it from anywhere, this rules out the AT&T POP servers as a final destination, since POP is a miserable protocol for anyone who reads mail from more than one computers. I like to have all my mail folders available to me, as well, and POP has absolutely no support for server-side folders. So, I run an IMAP mail server at my house. The mailserver periodically runs fetchmail to download any new mail from AT&T and injects it into my local IMAP server. This means: (1) If I shut down, reinstall, blow up, or otherwise disable my home system, mail delivery will continue uninteruppted to my AT&T account. (2) As long as my home connection is up and running, my mail is available on an IMAP server than I can access from anywhere, from any IMAP capable software or device. (3) I can use procmail for mail filtering. (4) I can connect securely using IMAP over SSL, or IMAP over SSH. This is of particular importance to me when connecting to my mail from an "insecure" environment, such as a trade show floor. It works well, and the poll-with-fetchmail gives me a large amount of flexibility with my home systems. I can reinstall, upgrade, power down, whatever, without worrying about mail. -- Lars
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