Why I'm doing it
from my EdLug post:
: I've had my email on mac.com for some time, but it is getting pretty shitty (delays in recieving/sending email, crappy support) etc. I initially used it because it was hassle free and not too expensive; now, neither of these attributes apply.
: I had a quick look at gmail, but it's a bit too 'big brother' for me, and they don't support IMAP. I doubt they ever will, since this goes against their advertising business model.
: So, I came to the conclusion that I should host my own email. I've had a virtual machine at bytemark for some time, and the general support seems pretty good. Note: I have no intention of changing from bytemark.
: So, time for my questions: I want to host my own email, how difficult is that on an ongoing basis? How can it be made as easy as possible?
: My requirements are, in order of importance:
: 1 - Low, low, maintainence : 2 - IMAP (i.e. disconnected support) : 3 - Be able to choose whatever goddamn email address I like (I already own a domain) : 4 - Be able to handle 15000+ existing emails
: I have a background which included sysadminning, so I'm not scared of setting things up. However, I have a life, which includes programming as a main job, so the idea of fannying about with sendmail on my off-hours does not appeal to me.
: Btw, I have debian installed right now, so something that runs on that would be nice.
: Any ideas?
Status
I chose a Qmail + Dovecot combination initially, after reading the thread on EdLug and scouting round myself. I eschewed Courier-IMAP since I had some dimly-lit bad memories of trying to install it in the past. Postfix seemed to be a little too much like Sendmail on first pass; Qmail looked sufficiently different to be worth trying. For one thing, it has a neat way of using specially-named files as config as opposed to a large key=value config file.
Qmail was fairly simple to set up, once I realised I had to "apt-get install qmail-src" (which is a result of the combination of Dan Bernstein and Debian sticking to their principles wrt software distribution; I'll leave it up to the reader to conclude anything from this). Unfortunately, I fell at the last hurdle, which was setting up an SMTP relay for myself. I spend at least a month every year in Germany, so I must have a relay which I can use from there. The way that 'these things are done' in Qmail is via patches; you must track down, via google, a patch file which can be applied to your freshly downloaded qmail-1.03 distribution. It almost made it, but I think it fails the 'Low, low maintainence' test. Btw, dovecot was a breeze.
So, now I'm going to take my second choice: Postfix.
Update(20061223): Hey, guess what, not done yet. I really should wean my self off this poisoned teat.
Resources
Delicious:mailswitchproject