[Discuss] TLD for Personal Use - Email

[willrico at gmail.com (Will Rico)]

Given the downside of government/corporate snooping with hosted/cloud
email services like GMail and the overhead/complexity of running a
personal mail server, I'm wondering how common it is for small groups
of trusted friends to setup a single mail server for their collective
needs.  Does anyone have experience with that type of setup?

I'd love to move off of GMail, but for the time being I find GMail's
interface much faster than alternatives.  With the intent of
eventually dumping GMail, I started using Thunderbird several months
back to access my mail via IMAP, but found mail messages
loaded/rendered slower, all operations seemed slower, and the search
feature was both slower and less accurate.

Will

On Sun, Jun 9, 2013 at 10:31 AM, David Kramer <david at thekramers.net> wrote:
> 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.
>
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