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

[Vesa Muhonen]

On Thursday 11 October 2012 13:23:32 Menachem Moystoviz wrote: 
> The alternatives I'm aware of are:
> 2) Host my own server, paranoia demanding multiple redundant backups.
> 
> Pros:
> 2) Gain vast amounts of power over my email
> 
> Cons:
> 2) Hard to maintain, can crash at any moment, will drive me to early grave
> 
> Which do you suggest? Do you have an alternative?

  Not sure about my level of enlightenment, but here's my solution that has 
worked well for a year now. I wouldn't say that is's very hard to maintain 
once you get it running, which was the part that took by far most of the time.

  I have a VPS running on Linode [www.linode.com], but naturally any VPS 
provider will do as long as you get full access to the machine. Then I have a 
.eu domain to have a name for the server. As for the OS the server is running 
Debian stable.

  Debian was the choice because there is a very through guide on setting up 
your own email server at:
	http://workaround.org/ispmail/squeeze
That is a long document, but very good reading. If you end up going this path 
do read the whole thing first to get an idea what you're about to do.

  Of course running your own service needs backing up. Linode provides quite a 
cheap backup service of their own, which propably would be the easiest. 
However, as I'm already using SpiderOak [www.spideroak.com] for whom security 
and privacy are main selling points, with a little bit of scripting, I simply 
started using their service on my server as well.

  Anyways, that's the outline of my currrent setup that has been reliable for 
a year now. I did not have previous experience on setting up mail servers, so 
it took some time to set it up, but was all in all a good learning 
experience...and most definitely fun.
-- 
  Vesa Muhonen <vesa.muhonen at iki.fi>