[Cialug] E-mail

[Daniel A. Ramaley]

For those who own their own domains, what do you do for e-mail services?

For the last ~10 years i've had an OpenBSD box sitting on my home DSL 
line running qmail as my mail server. Yesterday i lost power for about 
4 hours, and when power was restored the server wouldn't boot. The 
machine is on a UPS and had a graceful shutdown, so i'm not sure why it 
died. It was the first machine i ever built (486DX2/66, 20MB RAM, 2.5 
GB HD; upgraded from 40 MHz/4MB/340MB). I suspect the power supply was 
dead, but i didn't have any other machines with an AT power supply to 
scavenge. Well, my firewall (the 486 in a cardboard box i brought to a 
meeting many years ago), but i wasn't about to take that offline. So to 
get mail running again i yanked the ethernet card and hard drive, and 
dropped them into a Pentium-II i had in storage that was old enough to 
have ISA slots. While it runs noticeably faster in the more modern 
hardware, i'd like to look for something different. If most people 
still manage their own e-mail and recommend it, i'll probably set up a 
new server with more modern software and features. I'd really like both 
IMAP and a web mail interface; currently i just have POP. Spam 
filtering would also be nice as i currently get about 200/day on one of 
my accounts. But if something like Google Apps or a different low-cost 
paid service is easier to manage, i'd be interested in hearing about 
experiences with those.

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Dan Ramaley                            Dial Center 118, Drake University
Network Programmer/Analyst             2407 Carpenter Ave
+1 515 271-4540                        Des Moines IA 50311 USA