Home LAN email setup. Do you love yours?

[Bill Moseley <moseley@hank.org>]

Another in the series of my open-ended quesitons on email setup, and long
post that will be hard to respond to, I fear. ;)

I'm about to build a new machine that will host my mail server.  I'm
looking for suggestions on the overall design.  This is not a question
about mail clients.

Here's the executive summary in case this message is too long:

 o Can I use IMAP and still have access to my large collection of email?
 o Is there a tool that will auto-archive old mail, make it searchable,
   and still available to the mail clients?  
 o how should a secodary MX be setup?
 
I'll describe my past setup, but I'm looking for suggestions on how to
setup and manage email, if yours really works well for you.

I don't use an ISP for my mail.  I have only a few users, and I host a
few domains and simply redirect mail.

My old setup was: a few linux machines and my main desktop was Windows 98
that had three uses: 1) browsing, 2) SSH terminal to my linux machines, 3)
reading email with Eudora.

The big problem here is the Windows machine downloaded the mail with POP3
so it was no longer available on the lan (or when I connected remotely).

Lately, I've just be using Pine to read my mail (like many of you, I get
about 500 mail messages a day).  One thing I've found about using a very
basic client like Pine is it's really fast to get through all my mail.  I
may end up a Mutt user.

Filtering:

I strongly believe that filtering of incoming mail should happen at
delivery time, instead of with the email client.  Any client should be
able to see the same folder layout.  So something like procmail is the way
to go.  Mail clients should be able to move messages to different folders,
of course.

Part of this is probably, should I use mailbox or Maildir?

IMAP?

I like the idea of IMAP, but I have huge mailboxes.  I currently have
about 60,000 messages in my mailboxes with a few mailboxes that are in the
5,000 to 10,000 message range.  I fear IMAP would be very slow.  

Eudora actually has handled this ok, which is why I have not been better
and thinning out my mail.  Some of that is list traffic that should be
purged, but my big folders are work related and I'd like to keep those.

Searchable Archives?

I should find a better method of archiving messages, but haven't needed
that yet (since Eudora is fine with large folders).

A system that auto-archived old read messages into a searchable archive
would be great -- but I'd need a way to select and reply to an old
archived message.  That is, bring a message or thread out of the archive
and into the mail system.

If I could keep my mail box size down (yet still available) then IMAP
might be the way to go.

But I'd need a system where I can search for an email, and it would search
both the current mail and the archived mail.  Is there such a thing?

Tracking sent mail:

This is more about mail clients, perhaps, but one thing I liked about
Eudora was that if I replied to a message a copy of my reply was stored in
the same mailbox, in addition to the outbox.  That just makes it easy to
look at entire threads in a given folder (I need to do that often with
discussions I have for work), or also search for a message I sent in the
outbox - if I don't remember what folder I sent the message from.  A
better email search feature would probably solve that.


Secondary MX?

Some people say don't use a secondary MX.  Let the sender's cache while
you are upgrading memory.  What I currently do is I have an old P133 that
runs as a secondary, but is designed to deliver to a single user.  Mail
comes into that machine is simply forwarded (with a .forward) to the main
mail server.  This has saved me a few times.  When the main server has
gone down I can connect to the secondary and disable forward and then use
Pine on that machine to still have access to my incoming mail.

That's not a very elegant setup, so looking for suggestions there, too.


Client Access?

Finally, how should clients access the email.  That's easy if I can use
IMAP (i.e. if I can keep my folder size small enough for IMAP to not be
slow).

Should I ssh into the machine where the mail is stored and run the clients
that way (X-forward for GUI mail clients)?  Slow when over slow remote
connection.

Or NFS mount my home directory from each machine?  Can't allow that
outside the LAN.




Thanks very much,

-- 
Bill Moseley moseley@hank.org