Re: Home LAN email setup. Do you love yours?
Bill Moseley said:
> o Can I use IMAP and still have access to my large collection of email?
sure, provided you use a fast imap server and have a fast computer in
general i notice below you have large inboxes ..
o Is there a tool that will auto-archive old mail, make it searchable,
there are some tools that can connect to imap servers and do stuff
automatically, but I've never tried them. one such tool seems to be:
http://www.jplanglois.com/products/imapcp/
> and still available to the mail clients?
have the product dump the email in another inbox, and it can be searchable
yes.
> o how should a secodary MX be setup?
do you really need one? I've been running my personal email since 1996
and have never had a secondary MX. basically you configure a 2nd server
for relay for your domains and instruct that server to route mail for
your domains to your system, it will keep it in the queue for up to typically
5 days while it tries to deliver it.
> 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?
not sure, I have almost no filtering, I take advantage of the fact that
I have my own servers, so I have about 70 email accounts. These accounts
are setup in a special way, there is no system account associated with
them, only a mailbox and a mail alias. I configure cyrus via acls to grant
my primary account full access to all of these other inboxes, then with
any IMAP client I can read email for every other account. I can unsubscribe
from such accounts and they will continue to recieve email. The only
filter I do have is for my main inbox which filters *****SPAM**** as marked
by spamassassin to my trash(wish it worked on all folders but it doesn't).
Newer cyrus supports server-side filtering but I have not tried it. Have
not tried procmail for filtering either.
> 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.
it would mostly depend on the client. If you use a client which caches
the data, such as mozilla, initial access will be slow, but accesses after
that will be fast provided you have a fast IMAP server running on fast
hardware. Courier and cyrus are the fastest that I am aware of(I haven't
tried courier myself).
> 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?
depends how you organize the mail, some mail clients have the option to
"search this folder and all sub folders" which can make it easier..
I've been using squirrelmail for my personal mail exclusively for about a year
and a half because I got tired of re-configuring my email client for each
new machine I use. And squirrelmail has a great identity feature which allows
me to have a dropdown box(currently with about 50 addresses) so I can choose
where my email comes 'from'. Mozilla has a similar feature but last I
checked, each address had to be associated to a unique account and I don't
want to add 50 accounts to have mozilla track esp if I only need 1 to monitor
all accounts.
> 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
not sure about this, I'm not aware of any other clients that do this,
haven't used eudora since 1997. perhaps just cc: yourself?
> That's not a very elegant setup, so looking for suggestions there, too.
most mail servers will queue up to 5 days. On dec 27 I had a 10.5 hour
power outage(longest power outage I've experienced, perhaps in my life,
but at least since sometime in the 1980s). My battery backup lasted about
an hour then it was down. mail flew in after it came back up, no problems.
A secondary MX would be useful if you have a 2nd route to your mail system
during the outage. Example, my former employer had 3 offices, the main
mail hub was at a california office, hooked to a T1. The office had a 2nd
t1 that was connected to another t1 which was connected to a vpn which
connected to my office(and another office). My office had a 2nd t1 as
well to the internet. So if the main t1 at the main office was down or
unreachable mail could come through my t1, and out my other t1 and down
through the vpn, to the mail hub. It worked well. I suppose we coulda set
up another server on the other t1 but that woulda been expensive(I don't
use old crapboxes :/)
> 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).
for internal I use IMAP via squirrelmail. I don't think I provide IMAP in
general though I believe it binds to the loopback interface. But at my
former employer I provided IMAP4 + POP3 + IMAP4/SSL + POP3/SSL (SSL services
provided by sslwrap). From outside the firewalls the only options were
POP3/SSL and IMAP4/SSL or Squirrelmail(or they could dialup to our RAS or
login through VPN). No SMTP was provided for outside the firewall. It worked
well. For home I used to provide an IMAP account for my PDA so I could read
my email and not compromise my primary account uid/password. Since my PDA
does not support encryption. I have nothing overly private in my email so
security is not as much of a concern, but protecting my main password was,
wouldn't want someone to authenticate with one of my other services with that!
Now, that's impossible since my system no longer accepts password
authentication for SSH. And I don't run ftp/rlogin/telnet/etc
> 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.
depends. I really like squirrelmail. it has it's ups and downs but for me
the ups are worth the tradeoffs. my mail backend is:
P3-800 1GB ram
Dual 100GB Western digiital drives special edition in raid 1(software)
Debian woody
Postifx w/spamassassin and sanitizer running at the MTA level(VERY resource
intensive)
cyrus 1.5 for IMAP
squirrelmail 1.2.9(retrieved from the website, I've been using SM since
01/2001, so haven't tried the debian version)
lots of SM plugins
apache-ssl for SM
OpenLDAP for password authentication & mail routing
APC php accelerator(php4-apc)
I flush my mailboxes regularly, esp those on mailing lists, at the moment,
currently SM lists my mailbox usage(from those folders that I am subscribed
to:
Folders subscribed to: 30
Total Messages: 6317 (60-70% of this is my archives)
Unread messages: 783
Total size: 30 m
> Or NFS mount my home directory from each machine? Can't allow that
> outside the LAN.
email over NFS I read is dangerous due to locking issues, I wouldn't
reccomend it, unless it was read-only. some mail servers may be more
forgiving then others.
nate
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