{"id":257,"date":"2005-01-11T05:31:00","date_gmt":"2005-01-11T05:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/Miscellany\/maildilemma.html"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T04:00:00","slug":"maildilemma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/2005\/01\/11\/maildilemma\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mail Dilemma"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the side-effects of getting my new iMac G5<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}