[arch-general] Suggestions for email for a paranoid Archer

[Scott Lawrence]

On Thu, 11 Oct 2012, Menachem Moystoviz wrote:

> 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.
>
> Naturally, I found out that most anti-spam software is leery of mail from
> dynamic DNS hosts who do not have rDNS and PTR records set up,
> that they preferred DKIM mail, etc.
>
> Seeing as these involve even more effort, I thought to ask the enlightened
> members of the Arch community which solution they would suggest me to use,
> because I trust you to have made intelligent decisions in this matter and
> believe you understand this outlook. Also, I've seen many users with email
> addresses issued by their own domain, which leads me to believe some of
> you may have gone through this before.
>
> The alternatives I'm aware of are:
> 1) Do what most people do, and just sign up for webmail, paranoia demanding
>    me to download all email every day. Possibly alias the domain by routing
>    everything through postfix first.
> 2) Host my own server, paranoia demanding multiple redundant backups.
> 3) No email - Knuth style
>
> Pros:
> 1) Very reliable, better support, and non-crazy
> 2) Gain vast amounts of power over my email
> 3) Less distraction, no effort at all
>
> Cons:
> 1) Less control, more black box. Is aliasing even possible? Too many providers -
>    which to choose?
> 2) Hard to maintain, can crash at any moment, will drive me to early grave
> 3) Harder to keep in touch with people this way, harder to check what's going on
>
> Which do you suggest? Do you have an alternative?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Gesh

I took the fourth way - I gave up. Acclimated myself to the idea that no, all 
of my email won't be reliably archived, and it will be neither private nor 
particularly reliable, and stuck with acme webmail. (Gmail in this case, as 
you can see.) It's still preferable to no email whatsoever, and I fetch email 
with fetchmail, read it with alpine, and save those bits that I know need 
saving.

Barring that, I found this to be a good guide: 
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/04/so-youd-like-to-send-some-email-through-code.html, 
although it's obviously targeted towards those automating the sending of 
massive volumes of email.

-- 
Scott Lawrence

Linux jagadai 3.5.4-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Sat Sep 15 08:12:04 CEST 2012 x86_64 GNU/Linux