The Mail Dilemma
One of the side-effects of getting my new iMac G5 is that I now have two systems from which I want to read email. I currently use POP to retrieve my mail to the Powerbook. If I move my POP setup to the iMac, I can no longer check my mail from anywhere via the Powerbook. This is compounded by the fact that I currently have 7 POP accounts from which I fetch my mail.
Looking at the list of accounts, there are really only two that I need to access from anywhere. One is my jclark.org address which is published on this site, and is my primary address. The other is an email address provided by my broadband provider; it’s the address I use for all business transactions, including my domain registrations and hosting plan. That has to remain separate from my hosted email accounts, obviously.
So, even If I move all of the other accounts to the iMac as POP accounts, I still have to address which I’d like to be able to access from anywhere (defined as: from the iMac at home and from the Powerbook anywhere). I want to have my old mail available as well, not just new mail. I don’t like webmail; even GMail doesn’t really cut it for me.
So, I’m considering switching to IMAP. I don’t have any experience with IMAP, so I’m not sure how to judge it. The next issue is where to host it. My webhost offers IMAP, and they recently increased my storage limit, so that might be reasonable for my hosted email address. The other address is not hosted there, and I don’t know if there’s a way I could relay it. I’m aware of things like fetchmail, but I don’t know if I could have my host fetch mail from an external account and put it into an IMAP account.
There’s also the possibility of running my own mail server at home. The iMac could likely handle it, but I’ve also got an old box or two that could easily become a mailhost. The problem then becomes one of addressing, as I don’t have a fixed IP address. In reality however, my IP address almost never changes, and I’m sure I could setup a script on the mailhost to update a file on my webhost whenever it does.
The real dilemma here is that I don’t really know enough about the technologies to make an informed decision. I understand the basic differences between IMAP and POP, but I know little about IMAP or how to setup a server. Does IMAP use mbox files? I’m aware of unix-y tools like fetchmail and procmail, but I know little about them. Eventually I’m going to have to spend a bunch of time Googling and reading. Suggestions for a one-stop web (or book) resource covering all of this would be appreciated.
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I considered various options when I faced the same issue. I finally decided on having my primary computer use fetchmail to collect ALL of my mail from my several POP and IMAP accounts in various places. They are then passed to postfix, which delivers the mail to my account on my local machine. I then run imapd locally, such that my computer is an IMAP server. I can therefore use any email client (pine, Mail.app, Thunderbird) to access my inbox (as well as all of my archived email). When travelling, I always have all of my old email on hand for reference, and I can be sure it is always backed up properly without regard to server quotas. (and yes, after several years of archiving almost all of my mail, I am about halfway towards the 1 gig quota of gmail)
By opening up the proper port in my firewall, I can access my email from any other computer in my home by using any email client – simply connect to the IMAP server, and my mail is there.
Additionally, this lets me run a variety of procmail scripts on all of my incoming mail (including one that calls bogofilter for spam filtering, one that saves a copy of important emails to a backup folder for future reference, etc).
If my cable modem goes dead, I have all email up to the last 15 minutes or less before the connection loss, as fetchmail is set to run every 15 minutes.
It takes a little effort to set things up the first time if you aren’t familiar with postfix, fetchmail, and procmail, but the flexibility you achieve is great. For people who like to tweak their computer endlessly, it’s the only way to go in my view.
Additionally, I have even run a webmail server on my local machine. Again, by opening the firewall, I could access all of my stored email from any computer in the world.
Just something to think about. ;)
IMAP is one of those technologies that, once you use it, you can never go back.
Agreed. IMAP rocks. The only way I’d change now is to bring all my email in house, and I’d still provide webmail & IMAP for when I’m out of the house.
I’ll tell you what.. I’ve got that SansPointe dot com domain sitting around. I’d be glad to let you tinker around with the email set up on that if you like and get used to it. I’ll talk to you “offline” (God, I hate using corporate buzzwords!) about it.