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Ask Slashdot: Self-Hosted Gmail Alternatives?
linkedlinked writes "I'm tired of building my sandcastles on Google's beachfront. I've moved off Docs, Plus, and Analytics, so now it's time to host my own email servers. What are the best self-host open-source email solutions available? I'm looking for 'the full stack' — including a Gmail-competitive web GUI — and don't mind getting my hands dirty to set it up. I leverage most of Gmail's features, including multi-domain support, and fetching from remote POP/IMAP servers. Bonus points: Since I'm a hobbyist, not a sysadmin, and I normally outsource my mail servers, what new security considerations do I need to make in managing these services?"
You have to be blind if you consider Squirrelmail anywhere close to comparable to a modern interface like Gmail. It pretty much embodies the visual style of '90s Perl scripts, and that's certainly not a good thing.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
For over 15 years, I spent my time doing my own servers. Figured out that I was spending too much time doing server admin and not enough building sand castles. Now, I am on Google.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I've been a sysadmin for about 15 years now. I used to host all my own e-mail, my own website, all that stuff. I had a webmail interface (Squirrelmail), spam filtering, IMAP, blah, blah blah. Then about 6 years ago I got deployed to Iraq. I couldn't use SSH from the DoD network, so updates became a big issue, spam became an issue as I couldn't maintain my filters easily. After a couple of months I went hosted on my domain. Web based admin tools meant I could maintain stuff without SSH, they had a much less "hands on" backup procedure (at the time mine involved CDs), the service was down less often than my DSL used to be... Honestly at this point I can't see the value in maintaining all this stuff for myself. I pay less for hosting than I would have to pay for a "business class" DSL or cable line for the static IP, they handle most of the hard work, and what they don't handle, I manage from a web based dashboard.
There are tradeoffs and disadvantages, but for 80-90% of personal uses cases I can't see why you'd want to personally maintain a server these days. If you simply enjoy doing it, that's one thing. If you have a business of any size, again, there's a good argument for self hosting. For most people though, just pay someone to take care of the grunt work for you. You'll have less downtime, and spend a lot less of your free time fiddling with it.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
I think the whole exercise is short sighted. I've been there, done that. The amount of effort to keep everything running, updated, configured, etc is a PITA. Setting up a solid spam filter is a huge undertaking because it's a multi layered approach. SA or equiv, various milters, and more and you still won't come close to GMail. When I finally gave in and decided to switch to Google Apps I was floored by the improvement in Spam filtering. Are there quirks with Google' stuff. Sure. But they are improving it. I finally today got most of my stuff tied to my personal count migrated to my Apps account. The family enjoy using their apps accounts too compared to what we used to have. We've used IMP, Squirrel Mail, ROundcube, and others. Roundcube is the best in that group interface wise, but is still very buggy. Was Horde fun to play with way back before Google's services existed? Yup - because they were something not easily done elsewhere. But now? So good luck - it certainly can be done, but to be done right requires a lot of effort that's only worth it if you have nothign better to do or are a internet services admin at work and like to tinker at home. And even then... I can spend all that time spent screwing with my internet 'stack' and apply it to better things now that Google just handles the day to day stuff. Am I concerned about them 'owning' me - maybe a little. But so far, they've not done evil to me. Plus even if I wanted to migrate all my stuff back to a personal server again, Google Voice is the deal breaker for me. Can't live without it.
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The guy is "a hobbyist, not a sysadmin" and is looking for a self-hosted alternative webmail. The thing is, unlike a lot of other parts of life, mail hosting is basically a sewer of pain. Potholes and pitfalls are absolutely everywhere. To make a bad analogy, the guy basically posted "I'd like to be more independent. So I've decided to learn to fix my car, start growing some vegetables in my backyard. And, oh yes, have a baby. Are babies hard?" All of those are valid goals, that people everywhere should aspire to. But, as the germans say, he needs to be aware of the commitment and Kindersheisse of maintaining a mail server.
And I've been on both sides of the "black-hole everyone's mail" problem. If a server is sending out spam, a single server can easily be sending out hundreds of pieces of spam to each and every one of your users per day. Chances are, that "server" is a hacked Windows XP box someone in their IP block left online (there really aren't anything other than hacked Windows XP boxes online these days). Or a server with inadequate protections that is being maliciously harnessed. Or someone put the address into a blacklist wrong. Either way, without these blacklists e-mail service as we know it would be over. And, unfortunately, there are people profiting from spam, fighting every bit as hard as the legitimate users to get off of the blacklists.
And that's without taking into account the basic technological issues, like needing redundancy and response significantly higher than take-it-or-leave-it services. If your docs server is down, you have to wait a bit to access your documentation. If your mail server is down for long enough, you lose all of those messages. Also, all of your clients get messages that your system is down, but you don't. You get hit constantly by volumes of spam, leading to waves of DDOSing. People don't back any mail up, but require it to be available forever. And, this may just be personal perception, but I swear that all mail servers are coded to be suicidal.
So yes, the effort put out to host one's own mail server is disproportional to the payoff in terms of personal information security. Because it's not building a server. It's committing to hosting an ongoing part of the mail ecosystem.
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