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The nice thing with email is that it is many layers and you can decide what you do yourself and what not.

So here is what I did. The companies names are the ones I use. There will be others that do the same or more.
1) Have a domain (12 EUR per year) 15 EUR per year Includes 2 email adresses
2) DNS service. I use one that is free. Points the MX records to my web provider.
3) Webhosting for 25 EUR per year. (Do not think they sell that type) with unlimted emails and email aliasses.
4) Fetchmail, to get the email. Free.
5) Imap web server Free.

So there are 5 things. You actually only need one. That is the first one. So you are done for 15EUR per year. If you need webhosting, have that instead. Just see that the domain is in your name when it is free, not theirs. Again 15 EUR per year total.

Most will have some sore of webmail and/or IMAP or SMTP service that you can use.
You can even do it step by step. Just start with the domain (with free email) and then go from there as you feel comfortable or have time. You can even see to it that you give it to Google to read, if that is OK for you.

The reason I use my own mailserver (not that hard to install, if you are able to follow basic steps you find online) is that almost all mail services are blocked where I work. They block on domain name (I know.) and mine is not in any filter. If they do, adding a subdomain would be trivial.

Oh, you do need SSL if you have your own server https://certbot.eff.org/ to the resque.

So for 15 EUR per year I would just jump in. Hold on to your old address for at least a year just to be sure. The worst that could happen is that you wasted 15 EUR (or less) and learned nothing. Besat would be that you nbow have your own domain that you can use and abuse with email, website, linking to home (dynamic DNS might be needed. Zoneedit has this and is free.) and that you learned a lot about things along the way.

As an added bonus of unlimited aliasses, I now use a different email for different companies. e.g. slashdot.org@example.com here. So that way I know if something strange goes on. An email from my bank to a differnt address? Spam! A mail to my bank address and not from my bank. Breach at the bank or sold email!
Easy to filter on top of whatever filters I deside to use.

Main thing: See that the domain is actually on your name before you hand it out. That way you can transfer it to anywhere away from the DNS company, if you so desire. That is also the reason I use zoneedit. That way my provider can never hold me hostage. I just point the DNS elsewhere and 48 hours later (at most) all will work at a new provider.

I hate HTML in Email. I hate top posting. I hate Images in my emails, especially from companies who use it to track me even if just to see if I read their email. (Not talking about spammers here)

I used Mutt almost exclusive till a while ago. I now use a web interface with Roundcune. The advantages (YMMV) to me are that I have the same interface all the time, no matter if I am on a local machine, a new installed machine, at work or on a friends PC, independent of the OS I am on.

It is much easier to navigate from folder to folder and see if there is mail in a new folder or not. Much easier than with mutt (with the added extent ion of being able to see the mail folders). I just get my mail from my provider with fetchnmail and sort it with procmail. Sorting is easy, because I use a lot of aliasses. For each company or website I work with I use company1.tlt@example.net and company2.tld@example.net.

I then filter in folders like e.g. friends, financial, stores, mailinglists, generieric websites, spam, ...

So now I am able to easily see the different mailboxes and if I want to read them or if it can wait. I do not see images unless I tell it to show them.

And about the HTML: I do hate it. Unfortunately this is how others send their mail to me and to me the communication is more important than the form. So if people send it in HTML, I will get it that way. Does not mean that a reply will be send that way.

That said, on my phone I use BlueMail with Imap to my home server. As I do not use it that often (only if I have no access to anything else and I expect an urgent email) I will just look at the specific email and not even use it to reply.
That one unfortunately shows the images. As I do not use it often (perhaps 2 - 3 times a week) I am too lazy to find anything else and using ssh on a phone is even worse.

So, comparing apples to apples, the apache22 init script in FreeBSD has around 190 lines, and nginx's ~140, including comments and dependencies. The scripts are quite easy to understand and show how to put everything in place.

Still an order of magnitude more complex than systemd.

[Unit]
Description=MaraDNS secure Domain Name Server (DNS) recursive resolver
Documentation=man:Deadwood(1)
Requires=network-online.target
After=openhomecrypt.service
After=network-online.target
After=network.service

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/Deadwood
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

None of them are useful to me.

Then what are we discussing? Use your old style sysvinit.

Theoretically. In practice, it overrides the way sysvinit works, and you need to explicitly re-enable it.

I don't know again what you mean. The sysvinit init scripts are still working.

it doesn't, as systemd isn't capturing the program's log.

Because it doesn't suppose to do that. The journald is used internally by systemd, and services can opt-in to use it. It's also a situation of damn if you do, damn if you don't do. How many times I red on Slashdot the complain that with systemd you must have binary logs, or that it takes over logging.

In Roundcube for example you can opt-in into syslog logging. http://trac.roundcube.net/tick... The same options should be there to enable journald logging. At least systemd captures sysout and syserr into the journal, so it's not lost. Another huge improvement over sysvinit. How many times I had to start a daemon manually so I can see the errors from syserr.

But again, the MySQL logs are still there in /var/log ? It's not systemd fault if Oracle is not updating MySQL to use journald.

GPG/PGP support has been worked on a few times. This is one of the latest attempts:

http://lists.roundcube.net/pipermail/dev/2013-January/022123.html

Or you could run Roundcube on a host you trust. Setup Postfix to use TLS to send/receive mail from your trusted friends who also run their own email systems.

I run qmail for sending/receiving mail (on Gentoo; netqmail package), using maildir, of course. On top of that, I run the Courier IMAP server on my internal network (with TLS encryption). Until a few months ago I used Mutt as a client (console-based), but I've moved to using Roundcube (web-based email), which I initially installed for my wife, and have been happy with it. I also have some automatic filtering to folders via Maildrop (another Courier utility; it looks at a ~/.mailfilter file to route mail).

Roundcube/the IMAP server's search is OK most of the time - I keep my inbox small and move older mail to sub-folders - when I want to do advanced searches or search large mailboxes I log in and grep through folders of interest; this works well with the maildir format with one file per message. Maildir was also quite resilient when I had a HD crash and needed to recover some lost mail (block scan for blocks that look like mail headers found most missing items, and I do better backups now - mail is under ~/.maildir and gets backed up automatically).

I would move older messages to maildir (there are plenty of mbox converters, and almost anything non-proprietary should be convertible to mbox or maildir via existing programs or a short perl script) - even if at some point maildir dies off entirely, which seems unlikely, converting it to another format will always be trivial due to its simplicity and it has the advantages mentioned above of being able to search easily with grep etc.

I use thunderbird at home, but to be honest, roundcube does everything I need very well, and actually runs faster than thunderbird.

Since I can't use imap directly from work, I installed roundcube on my home servers. It's very nice. I would assume that you could also just install a local lighty with php and run that as a local web-based solution if you don't have your own web server.

http://roundcube.net/

If mobile devices had decent terminal emulators, I might still be using local mail on a machine somewhere.

Have you heard of IMAP? Use the local email clients on your laptop, mobile phone, desktop and whatever to access a single email account. I've got Dovecot running on a virtual server, and access it from numerous devices. I've also got Roundcube installed on the server, for a webmail interface.

(I've been running my own email system for some years now - and it's been surprisingly straightforward to admin. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, but I like having an alternative to all the big, ad-funded webmail services...)

I certainly do. Best way for me to manage my multiple email accounts with multiple servers.

This thing has a Vista-rushed-to-market feel about it.

Your post came at the right time for me; I'm in the middle of switching my company email store from POP3 to IMAP, mainly so I can see the same email on my laptop, desktop, tablet, and even (only in an emergency; I'm not a masochist) my smartphone.

I finally decided to have only one main email account, and forward every email address to it. That makes it easier to sort and manage email (if you're reading more than one account with a desktop email client, you probably know what I mean). True I get my important business email, my junk email, and even my personal email, all in one inbox, but I'm learning how to use Sieve. Now it doesn't matter on which client I sort my emails into various folders, every client shows the result.

True most email clients aren't that good at human interfaces to Sieve yet, but that will chane with time and use, and in the meantime, the RoundCube webmail client does the job admirably (and as I've written, the resulting rules will work no matter which client you use to read your email). You don't need a provider who uses RoundCube; you can run it locally and point it to any imap store.

Note this is a work on progress for me; today is the first day I'm actually writing the sort rules. I may feel differently tomorrow, but today, so far so good.

Try Communigate Pro if you can swallow the price.
Iris for a set of free software.
Use Roundcube for webmail.

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned imapproxy. http://trac.roundcube.net/wiki/Howto_Performance

The best webmail UI I've used other than Gmail is Roundcube. It's simple, clean, and works quite well.

Roundcube looks/feels a lot better than SquirrelMail

SquirrelMail is awesome for being simple, fast, and non-JavaScript.

If you want something more JavaScripty, there's Roundcube.

It's not gmail, but the point is your data's yours.

Postfix/Dovecot setup tutorials

RoundCube does not display images by default. It is a modern web mail application used by hundreds of ISPs and thousands of end users.

Grepping through 7GB of email is slower than hell. I have yet to find a mail client that will import and index that much mail without crashing.

You don't want to use a mail *client* to index that mail! Leave it to the server instead. I have no problems searching through my mail archives which are somewhat smaller than yours as am picky in what I archive (no mailing lists etc) but with 1.1 GiB still constitute a lot of data. My mail server is nothing special either, a rebranded Intel NAS box with a 1.4 GHz single core Celeron and 2GiB of memory. It runs a bog-standard dovecot imap client and a web mail server (roundcube with a few site-specific changes) and works its way through our mail just fine. No ads, no big brother, no nothin'. Zuck and Schmidt can recreate Dante's Inferno in email and I'll be happily mailing away. If you have a permanent connection and an always-on machine (NAS box, router, etc) there is no reason not to run your own services as far as I can see - other than interfering ISP's of course. Yes, you'll have to take care of your own backups - which is where Gmail and PGP come in handy if you are so inclined - but that is a small price to pay for 'freedom' IMnsHO.

It's nice to be able to apt-get yourself the latest stable copy of apache2 and php5 and mysql and postfix humming with just a command or two, also nice to be able to apt-get upgrade them after you apt-got updated. Those who maintain, clean and contribute to the large public repositories that apt and yum and rpm and pkg_add, good people and they generally do a bang up job for 99% of the Linux and UNIX and UNIX-like folks. However, when you maintain servers which are not completely hidden behind a nat with these programs for years and once in a blue moon compile something you downloaded in a gzipped tar, you put yourself on admin autopilot and that can bite you in the ass.

Give you one example: I installed RoundCube, the most badass webmail client there will ever be, ever, with apt (the first time). Ran it for a while without incident. Had my system on weekly cron apt updates so I figured I was safe. Eventually I discover someone made it onto my system and put a malware installing js line in my web pages. Looking through the guy's bash history I discovered they got in through a RoundCube vulnerability. I checked out RoundCube's site, something I should have done first thing but did not, and it turns out their stable version was much newer than what apt realized and that this vulnerability would not have been on my system about five months ago had I downloaded straight from their site and stayed on the ball with their support resources which are things that are less necessary when you just let apt-get rip.

Bottom line, apt-get update/upgrading would not patch a glaring vulnerability in software I found with apt originally with the default Debian sources.list and I doubt it would have on most other distros' package management systems. It wasn't RoundCube's fault, the patched release was their Stable build for a long time but I was left wide open to anyone who went on a rootkit site and googled for roundcube hosts and I got nailed. Learned my lesson and I don't fault the repository maintainers for being behind the ball a bit on less popular software in their enormous archives but if you ask me software should not be available on the default repositories for Linux variants that the maintainers are not confident that they can keep up to date or don't have some kind of way to be quickly and effectively notified by the authors/vendors in the event of a critical upgrade being available and to put it live right quick. Put it on the people who want to install such software themselves -- if they can make it past that hump I'd say their odds of running the software safely will be substantially higher than Joe Yum. And spreading awareness of cvs/svn would be nice too.

Can't believe I just admitted I got compromised.

They already do. I've done support for W.A. schools that were having problems with their internal Exchange server. They were shocked when we discussed the 'real' price for Exchange. They paid less than $1000 for it including CALs and hardware. MS has some serious sweetheart deals for schools and I bet if it came down to providing even cheaper Windows and Office for schools they will do it.

That's not the real price, though. The real price also includes all the down time, extra re-builds, malware tools, etc. Add to that also the cost of missing incoming messages, missing outgoing messages and delayed messages -- these last add up to more work for the users, which can number in the 100's, rather than just the maintenance staff which can usually be counted on one hand.

Before MS Exchange was hammered through the back door, e-mail was both so fast and reliable that many used it in ways resembling instant messaging.

Worth a look:
Roundcube: http://roundcube.net/
Kolab: http://www.kolab.org/
Citadel: http://www.citadel.org/
Zimbra: http://www.zimbra.com/

If you need a plain vanilla mail transfer agent instead of all the non-essentials, then postfix, exim, qmail, the new sendmail, and simta each have their niche. They're used pretty much everywhere, even if you don't always see the evidence of them outside the message headers.

Wondering what Google was planning to do with the information they're constantly gathering on me between my emails, searches, news, websites I visit (tracked through adsense), etc, brought me to find a decent set of alternatives: Scroogle for searches, Roundcube for email, and scraper sites like Zewg and Dogpile for everything else.

So, how often do you find yourself switching OSes for extended periods?

But anyway, we're all geeks here, right? So solve the problem yourself.

1. Build a mailserver and install Cyrus IMAP.
2. Migrate your client-side filtering rules into a server-side "Sieve" script. Example snippet from mine:

   # ejabberd
   elsif header :contains "List-Id" "ejabberd.jabber.ru" {
   fileinto "INBOX.lists.ejabberd"; }
   
   # FreeBSD
   elsif header :contains "List-Id" "freebsd-alpha.freebsd.org" {
   fileinto "INBOX.lists.freebsd.alpha"; }
   elsif header :contains "List-Id" "freebsd-announce.freebsd.org" {
   fileinto "INBOX.lists.freebsd.announce"; }

3. Switch your email clients to use IMAP.
4. Install RoundCube webmail for those times when you're away from your own PC.
5. Realize that you have complete freedom to experiment with OSes and clients and browsers to your heart's content without having to worry about synchronizing your mail and making sure that your filters are identical everywhere.

The above is clearly not something I'd recommend to your average user. But again, we're all geeks here, right?

http://roundcube.net/

I like to take the "best of both worlds" approach. At home I use Thunderbird with IMAP. I also have a webmail client for the same account. The same mail is accessbile in both locations, including all folders, sent items, trash, etc. I can also make local copies or use folders offline if needed while using Thunderbird. The only thing that I can't do is sync the address book (which would be very useful!)

I much prefer to use Thunderbird for most of my mail usage, but webmail isn't that far off. I use RoundCube webmail (disclaimer: I help out on the project, so I may be biased) it has drag-n-drop message management, a nice look, and is generally useful. It's still quite beta but it's not so buggy it keeps people from using it on a daily basis.

I'd say IMAP+Thunderbird+Webmail is ideal for me, but it may not be an option for some people.

Why shut down your home system? Why not have it available as a server to make your life easier? I agree with other posters about using "offline" mode of Thunderbird and like clients.

In case you're thinking that you have a particularly repressive ISP...

My ISP blocks ports 80 and 25 - particularly irritating, if you ask me. My ISPs TOS, if read to the letter, would mean that multiple browser windows or tabbed browsing are inappropriate because it's more than one session over the broadband pipe.
 
I agree that it would be ideal if I could use every port I want, block the ones I want to firewall - but I'm too cheap to pay for that kind of access.
 
So I work around it. I use dyndns [dyndns.com] to create a pointer to my dynamic IP address. My ISP does not block https or ssh ports, so I leverage those to get what I want.
 
I use cron, fetchmail [berlios.de],
  procmail [procmail.org],
  spamassassin [apache.org], and
  postfix [postfix.org] to bring mail from my ISP to my local system.
 
I use uw-imapd [washington.edu] to share my mail with other computers on my home network
 
I use ssh and pine, or apache+php+MySQL+https (self-signed cert) with roundcube [roundcube.net] to get remote access to my IMAP server.
 
I use WinSCP [winscp.net] to get access to my files at home when I'm at work. My data is *MINE* and I easily back it up (nightly and offsite qurterly - snapshot backups coming soon thanks to rsnapshot [rsnapshot.org], perl and rsync)
 
Every tool that I use is free of charge and as free as the GPL and apache licenses are free (zealots can feel free to argue with someone else about the relative freedom of the GPL, thanks.)
 
I certainly could pay for more open TOS with an ISP - I could even host my applications at an ISP. I'm cheap, and this solution works well enough for me.
Hope you find a solution that works for you!
 
Respectfully,
Anomaly

My ISP blocks ports 80 and 25 - particularly irritating, if you ask me. My ISPs TOS, if read to the letter, would mean that multiple browser windows or tabbed browsing are inappropriate because it's more than one session over the broadband pipe.

I agree that it would be ideal if I could use every port I want, block the ones I want to firewall - but I'm too cheap to pay for that kind of access.

So I work around it. I use dyndns to create a pointer to my dynamic IP address. My ISP does not block https or ssh ports, so I leverage those to get what I want.

I use cron, fetchmail,
procmail,
spamassassin, and
postfix to bring mail from my ISP to my local system.

I use uw-imapd to share my mail with other computers on my home network

I use ssh and pine, or apache+php+MySQL+https (self-signed cert) with roundcube to get remote access to my IMAP server.

I use WinSCP to get access to my files at home when I'm at work. My data is *MINE* and I easily back it up (nightly and offsite qurterly - snapshot backups coming soon thanks to rsnapshot, perl and rsync)

Every tool that I use is free of charge and as free as the GPL and apache licenses are free (zealots can feel free to argue with someone else about the relative freedom of the GPL, thanks.)

I certainly could pay for more open TOS with an ISP - I could even host my applications at an ISP. I'm cheap, and this solution works well enough for me.

Respectfully,
Anomaly

Squirrel Mail, OTOH, can be faster if you use it in a way that minimizes page reloads. (Open each message in a new tab, etc.) Like I said though, I've pretty much moved to a JS based client for web mail due to speed considerations.

I have my own webmail, but it sucks.

Have you tried RoundCube? It's not perfect, but it's better than (for example) SquirrelMail, and has a reasonably active development group. It's about the best I've found, at least among those that are truly web-based (as opposed to downloading a "lightweight" flash client).

Um, what makes you think you can't access mail stored on an IMAP server from anywhere?

Even better, on my phone, the default client just works - runs off and downloads any new headers every 10 minutes. Maybe not quite as snappy as a Blackberry, but a damned sight better than any webmail service can do.

Back home, Mail.app and Spotlight give me all the searchy goodness I could want. My free space is limited by how many old HDDs I'm willing to throw into the server. My mail is spam filtered, and despite my not having a Windows PC, virus checked.

Plus, if the worse comes to the worse, and I can't access it any other way, I can always fall back sshing into the server, and running pine.

Support Roundcube.
 
Send Them Money.

Roundcube is a pretty nice open source AJAX webmail application currently in beta. My previous email provider offered it, and although rather feature bare (although no more so than Gmail), it is very promising.

RoundCube is pretty good and getting better all the time..

I've been where you are, hating horde, squirrelmail, etc (even though i shouldn't, it's an ambitious project).

We finally bought Kerio Mailserver for ~$600. Fantastic webmail, great imap (server side sorting!), good support of outlook, very good integrated calendaring, great integrated spam and anti-virus checking. Runs on a number of OS's, integrates with Active Directory, etc...

It does everything we ever actually tried to do with exchange for less than half the cost, and no stupid CALs to deal with.

You can get an eval copy from them, i would highly recommend checking it out. $600 isn't anything to sneeze at, but we're 7 ppl and i'd do it again in a heartbeat. If you do decide not to check it out, try RoundCube (http://www.roundcube.net/)

AJAX based drag-and-drop email is becoming commonplace now. At this point it's a "must have" feature, and any web based email program that doesn't have it is going to look as if it hasn't been updated since 2004 :)

Yahoo and MSN both have it now. Even the software that drives private email systems has it now. You've probably seen the screenshots for Roundcube, and you've probably seen the screenshots and swf-demos of systems like Citadel and Zimbra.

The point is, Google was the big trailblazer here, but at this point, everyone is now on that trail. The bar has been raised and rich AJAX webmail has quickly gone past "innovative" and is now "an expectation." Meanwhile, Google is probably busy cooking up the Next Big Thing. We hope. :)

Check out http://www.roundcube.net/ for another webmail that uses ajax. It is actually a front end to regular pop services.

Actually what I found really funny was one of their screenshots. I don't speak german, but there were a few words I recognized :)

http://roundcube.net/images/screens/mail_compose.j pg

Heh, looks like their demo at http://demo.roundcube.net/ might be a little bogged down by /.

I say use Roundcube webmail!
It's an Alpha release, but it's definitely worth having a look at it!

It's good that we have a standard protocol that all mail clients can use to access all mail servers. It's good that the protocol is open and unencumbered. It's a shame, though, that the protocol we standardized on was IMAP.

IMAP is an ugly, convoluted mess. And as I tend to rant about often, overly complex protocols encourage buggy implementations. "Keep it simple, stupid." If something like POP4 had become the standard, there would be a better selection of quality, non-troublesome email clients out there.

Although, with an increasing number of richly functional webmail systems out there now, perhaps the email fat client will become less relevant anyway. Of course, email clients will never go away entirely: you still need text-based access (pine and elm), and non-interactive clients such as Fetchmail...

Oh hell, I'll just come out and say it... anything is better than Outlook. :)

I think the first poster recommended this, and I can also vouch for it: Roundcube
Regards,
Steve

this GPL product claims it does:

http://www.roundcube.net/?p=about

Support for GPG/PGP encryption

I saw the new interface when my cousin, who works for yahoo was visiting. He was borrowing a computer, and I looked up and saw what I thought was Outlook Express. I went over to tell him the virtues of Firefox, when I realized what I saw was really an impressive browser based mail client.

This was back in early August, he said employees had been using it for a while, but it was hush-hush. He seemed pretty sheepish about it, and made me promise not to post on Slashdot, apparently yahoo wanted it under wraps for as long as possible.

He did give me the dog and pony show, and I must say that it really is a pretty slick application. Though I did not get to really test it, just watched him walk through it.

I own a small hosting company,and wanted to see what web-based mail clients were out there that I could use for my customers. Squirelmail and TWIG looked pretty ugly in comparison. Incidently I found an open source mail client that has a lot of similar functions: Round Cube I haveinstalled that and it is almost as impressive.

Anyway, it is amzing how far web applications have come in such a short period.

-MS2k

I did similar but for a much lower level of requirements. Eventually, I was pointed here:
http://www.roundcube.net/