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I can 1 up you. I got a static ip on my dsl and registered my own domain. I host it on a pentium 200 machine in my basement and run open webmail on it. I have webmail anywhere in the world hosted on my own server. I put up with noone elses crap for my webmail service.

I like openwebmail for POPing - http://www.openwebmail.org/

As you can see, setting up MTAs is a task you definitely want to seek experienced, professional help in doing, whichever MTA you use.

For the web-based mail solution, I think you can't go past http://www.openwebmail.org/. It's feature rich and flexible.

Sometimes the "simple" answers are the best. Yes, run your own email server. It doesn't have to be E-Smith, you could run your own flavor of *nix. Set up Mailscanner/SpamAssassin/[Generic Virus Scanner] and your users will be fairly safe and happy.

You can also set up something like OpenWebMail and allow them to access email from the web. Even via HTTPS, if you like.

Further, if you have an INTERNET outage, your people IN OFFICE will still have access to their email accounts. That translates as no immidate "I cant access my email" whines. And if ARIN.net lists your company (or you) as the authority, you can PERSONALLY deal with any major ISP to resolve blacklistings. I've had RoadRunner, AOL and ATTWORLDNET blacklist a series of IPs within which our email server happens to reside -- each of those were resolved within 24 hours.

Important Notes:

Be sure (PRACTICE!) that you know how to back up and restore your system.

Unless they NEED shell access, point all users to /bin/false.

Shut off EVERY service you do not NEED.

Cheap/Easy IDS: Personally, I like portsentry + SSH on non-standard ports. Your system would need to be scanned to find your SSH server... and portsentry would ban IPs trying to scan. It's not 100%, but will keep out the script kiddies.

Openwebmail http://www.openwebmail.org/

Offer your users webmail and a webdisk with one application. The webdisk is pretty full featured (although it doesn't do versioning).

With one app there will be less to maintain.

openwebmail does already all of it, and much more, apart from having not being officially tested for heavy use.

hula hasn't mail filter, so it cannot be considered as desktop replacement.

gmail has the abstract of the first lines of the message, and nor hula neither any other opensource or closed source webmail application seems to have this simple feature.

i couldn't see either if hula supports a javascript WYSIWYG rich text editor. or international spellchecking.

i use openwebmail as desktop replacement (web)mail application so i can have my sent-email folder always synchronized independently if i work home, office or elsewhere.

i wonder how many lines of code are needed to implement such features in hula or openwebmail.org...

Otherwise, I run my own mail server with blacklists and SPAM filtering, further filtering with my mail client, leaving me very few junk mail messages to actually deal with. As far as I know, no false positives have been lost. The server ignores suspected servers, andthe spam filter throws away any high-scoring mail, leaving low-scoring spam for the mail client to handle, which gives me a chance to find mail I would want to keep (very, very, rare), tossing the rest in the trash can so I can peruse them.

I have a web mail client, too, so I can check in from anywhere I can't fire up my client or shell in.

Also, I don't worry about space. I'm casual (OK, lazy) about deleting mail, and after several years of not deleting what should probably be deleted I've only accumulated a couple hundred MB of crap. (Yes, it's sorted automatically into folders by sender or content.) That includes old "let's have lunch" announcements as well as mail with large attachements. The server's got another 50GB of space on it (slowly being eaten by web server and mail logs), so I'm not too worried about running out any time soon.

1 GB would suffice and give me another few years to fill up. Then I'd probably have to get rid of those lunch invites from 1998...

A lot of hosts come with webmail access included (Dreamhost gives everyone webmail.[domain].com, for example).

If you want to install your own, have a look at SquirrelMail, Open Webmail, or Horde IMP. I've only used SquirrelMail, and it's pretty good.

That said, you'll be hard pressed to find anything with an interface anywhere near as good as Gmail. Cheap hosting is also likely to be slower and less reliable.

At age 75, my Dad only uses his PC to read e-mail, play a few simple games and visit a few web sites. His PC consists of one of my old systems with 256 Meg of RAM, a CDROM Drive, a Knoppix CD and NO HARD DRIVE. His email account in on one of my servers and he accesses it via Open WebMail from OpenWebMail.org. Running from a "live" CD, he never has to worry about spyware etc. If he "goofs something up" as he would say, a simple reboot puts things right again.

I just ditched my email client, I'm 100% on openwebmail now.

I'm a roaming contractor, so the alternative was trying to manage email clients at several locations, and constantly finding that something (address books, mail archives, etc..) was out of sync.

Totally perl based, and rather thourough.
I use it on a medium end coloc machine, and it runs wonderfully.
Here is the primary mirror site dealie. It has pop3 support, webdisk support, and a calander w/ reminder/notification support.

Been using it since it was Neomail, and I haven't had a single problem.

Openwebmail

Stepping away from the subject at hand for a moment. :)
I use OpenWebMail (used to be NeoMail) at home and it's not bad at all. I have a couple mailboxes with over 4000 messages it's only slow the very first time you open one (it builds an index). It has lots of features (multiple addresses on one account, text search, spell check, calendaring etc.)
If it talked to Exchange I'd be building a server for it for my client right now. :)

I would love to have a scheduling server at home for the family. We have a busy family life and keeping up with everyones schedules would be so much easier if it were in a centralized place.

Have you looked at Open Web Mail? I've used it for myself, and it is easy to set up and use. It has calendaring features and offers web based email access as well.