[Discuss] TLD for Personal Use - Email

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

On 06/08/2013 11:20 AM, Kent Borg wrote:
> On 06/08/2013 10:34 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
>> GIS is one of the last remaining independent ISPs. 
>
> Is that the same as Galaxy? If so, I heard they are shutting down.

Yup.  I got contacted a week or two ago from an acquaintance using GIS
looking for an alternate.
>
>> Having your own domain is useful, and you can do this through Google
>> as well. Gmail is free and has a lot of storage, and they support
>> both POP3 and iMAP. 
>
> You can do your own domain through gmail (instead of gmail.com) if you
> want to pay money. (Bonus: if you want some lost e-mail years hence
> you can file a FoIA request with the government!)
>
> I still run my own e-mail server in my basement on a static IP DSL
> connection. My spam filtering isn't as good as Google's, but between
> spamassassin and client filtering (Thunderbird) it isn't overwhelming.
>
> Yes, the definition of the "correct" way to run an e-mail server has
> changed through the years and I am due to replace the hardware...but
> mostly I can ignore it and it just runs.  But when something goes
> wrong instead of wondering how to get "them" to fix it, I get to/have
> to fix it myself.  Advice: if you do it yourself don't offer accounts
> to others, it makes my life much simpler with only me, my wife, and
> one occasional techie friend as users.

See, that's been my experience.  I run my own mail server (postfix),
listserve (mailman) and webmail (squirrelmail) (and a bunch of other
servicess) with about 10 domains, and after I got the mail server stuff
up and running, I hardly ever have to think about it.  When I was using
sendmail it was much harder but I switched to postfix a long time ago
and the config makes much more sense to me.  I even have bidirectional
secondary MX records with someone in another state so if one of our
servers goes down the other spools the mail and forwards it back when
it's up again (I admit that was a bit harder to set up).  The only real
nightmare I had was getting squirrelmail to be able to send mail through
postfix, and that turned out to be a bug in squirrelmail that got fixed
in a newer version.

I'm clearly not a super-sysadmin.  In fact, I'm not even a sysadmin. 
I'm a Software Engineer.  Of course I had help from others on all this,
but so would all of you.  So what is the perceived difficulty in running
your own mail server?  To me, the risk of an ISP screwing up, changing
TOS, raising rates, or doing me a favor by filtering out what they think
is "spam", is greater than the risk and inconvenience of running my own
server.  The electricity is a factor, but both of my servers (I moved
MythTV to a separate box running 5 hard drives and a capture card) draw
135w combined, plus some loss from the GPS.

I second the suggestion of not setting up IMAP or POP accounts for
random people.  Talking through setting up the mail client over the
phone is a drag, and now you have an announce list for planned and
unplanned downtime.   As it is I host content for various nonprofits on
my server and that's a problem.