[TriLUG] In a LUG a long time ago

[Steve Litt]

On Mon, 3 Nov 2014 13:17:58 -0500
Igor Partola <igor at igorpartola.com> wrote:

> So I have been on what feels like a never ending quest to move my
> email off GMail for various privacy and vendor lock-in concerns. The
> requirements are that it should provide plenty of space (at least 5
> GB's) as I am unwilling to change my pattern of archiving various
> conversations for later, be extremely reliable, and have great spam
> protection.

If your priorities are privacy, vendor lock-in, and spam protection,
and plenty of space, I'd recommend you do what I do: IMAP fetchmail
from my email provider to my Dovecot server, and use my email client as
a window into my dovecot server. Use procmail for all your filters, and
loop spamassassin or some other spam program through procmail.

To access it while on the road, poke a pinhole in your firewall and
access it through an ssh tunnel.

> 
> Looking at the options, there are basically three:
 
> 2. Host your own. This option is great, but I don't trust myself to
> keep it up 100% of the time, and I need it to be extremely reliable.
> Not getting a midnight page from a broken application is not
> acceptable. Not getting an invoice for renewing an SSL certificate
> for a client's web application is not acceptable.

If you're at home on the desktop hosting the dovecot, you're using
extremely reliable software: fetchmail, procmail, and dovecot. Once
they're set right, they work every time. Chances are, if you don't get
an email, it's because your host has a problem that would nail you
whether you kept the mails on your computer or theirs.

If you're accessing this remotely, I admit you now have your LAN,
firewall, and desktop computer as points of failure. But they're
nothing that can't be quickly resolved once you get home.

By the way, I try to have an extra firewall formatted and ready to
swap, in case the old one goes bad.

Anyway, you can probably trust your ability to admin procmail,
fetchmail, dovecot and a lan with firewall more than you can trust some
third party.

> 
> Moreover, I'd have to host it on rented equipment such as Linode,
> etc. and worry about backups myself, which sucks. I know enough to do
> it, but email is so critical to me that I don't trust my amateur
> skills.

Just keep it on your desktop computer. You back that up, don't you? I
wouldn't trust a vendor's backups as far as I can throw my house.

SteveT

Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance