New home mail server Part 1: Before
It’s time to replace the aging Linux server that is the latest in a long line of servers that have been storing our mail at home for the last decade. It’s gone through several upgrades, but the general architecture has been the same — a low-end tower or mini-tower computer running some form of Linux. For a long time, the OS and configurations have lived on one hard drive, with the mail store living on another physical drive. (The total mail store is around 2GB right now.) This is a lot of hardware running a pretty simple server. I’m sure I’m using a lot more electricity than I need, and the aging drives worry me. With modern technology I think I can do a bit better.
Here’s what the server does now, which defines what the replacement needs to do:
– fetchmail grabs mail for about 10-15 e-mail accounts out in various places on the Internet. I’m guessing around 200 e-mails/day.
– at one point fetchmail passed the e-mail through SpamAssassin, but I lost this on the last upgrade and never bothered to set it up again.
– fetchmail passes the mail off to procmail, which sends the mail off to a Cyrus IMAP/POP3 server. Once upon a time I had procmail doing lots of sorting, but this is another one I lost and never set back up.
– Any of the computers at home can connect via IMAP to look at the mail. Ditto for our Treo 680s, plus we use Thunderbird Portable if we want to check in from a friend’s computer. At one point I had SquirrelMail set up for checking mail from the web, but (you guessed it!) I lost this on the last upgrade and never set it back up.
Overall this has served us well for 10 years. Through desktop upgrade after desktop upgrade and multiple operating systems our e-mail has always been there for us. But do we really need a 350W power supply, multiple hard drives, video cards, etc. to accomplish this?
Next Part II: The new hardware
Have you considered using Gmail Hosted (aka Google Apps) for your email needs? It should meet all of the requirements you discuss, except for supporting IMAP. It can act like fetchmail to retrieve email from multiple mailboxes (pop3 only), it has great spam filtering, and can do amazing things with filtering/sorting.
-Tim “From across the hall at Commerce” Wood
Well, I kind of like having the mail stored locally. I might end up going to a hosted solution, though, and try some kind of replication scheme via IMAP to a drive at home.