I believe first question you need to answer is: what is your threat model? Are you afraid of losing all your mails (backups)? Losing control over your email address? What are you going to do if you can't login to your mailbox tommorow? How much do you mind if someone else gain access to your old mails? Computer criminalists, government, rouge google admin, google scanning your emails content for targeted advertising (privacy / security)? Are delays in delivering mail acceptable? (there are more questions) backups: getmail or imapsync and backup them like files control over mail address: buy your own domain, setup on your own server or something like google apps privacy / security: computer criminalists: good unique password, 2-factor authentication, use only trusted devices, don't do anything stupid privacy / security: government and google: use gpg to encrypt / sign your mails or setup your own server (with luks; remember, government can just steal your server from datacenter and there is nothing you can do about it) I think your own domain + backups + google apps is pretty good setup. Secure, reliable, cheap and you can switch to other hosting without changing your email address. If you don't trust google or government (well, you shouldn't :P) then setup your own email box. 2012/10/11 Menachem Moystoviz <moystovi@g.jct.ac.il>:
Recently, my paranoia levels have been ratcheted up by reading about companies' treatment of their users, along with an increasing awareness of my powerlessness with respect to most content providers. I therefore curbed most online activity and have attempted to host those services I used on my own server, in most cases living without when I didn't succeed.
Two months ago, I attempted to install postfix and dovecot on my Arch box in order to be able to host my own mail. Naively I thought that all I needed was the right software and a dynamic DNS address. In other words, I thought it would be as simple as setting up a web server.
Use cheap vps with static ip, it will be much easier. I doubt anyone keeps their mail server in home with dynamic ip. -- Krzysztof Warzecha