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On 25/02/11 18:09, Neil Winchurst wrote:
Recently one of the list members mentioned that he had set up his own server for his emails. At the time it didn't register. Can anyone tell me anything about this please? What are the advantages, if any, and is it very complicated? I have looked around Google and it looks rather messy to me. Anyone?? Neil
I think a few of us on the lost host our own servers. Personally I've had an e-mail server now for going on 7 years. My e-mail server is running in a VM on my main server.
Rather than go down the manually configure everything route I opted for an all-in-one distro called SME Server (currently version 7.5.1). It's based on CentOS Linux although it does have a few modifications. To configure it there is an easy to use web interface and by default the server provides Samba shares, Apache, PHP, MySQL and IMAP/POP3 e-mail with Horde for webmail.
It maybe a bit OTT for some but it does the job, or should I say, DID the job until I recently upgraded my broadband. Now I'm having a few issues and I'm looking to maybe go down the configure my own method (just to work out if the problem was the server or the Virgin Super Hub).
You could also look at maybe Zimbra if you have a high enough spec kit (for testing it recommends a 1.5Ghz CPU and 1GB Ram). It could be overkill for what you want as it is a bit like a replacement to Microsoft Exchange (so it has e-mail, calenders etc in it) but there is a free community supported version (it's Open Source under some Yahoo license, or at least it was, not sure what it's under since VMWare bought Zimbra).
Or you could go down the build your own method. This is what I'm looking at, not entirely sure what the best option is, I believe my existing e-mail server uses Dovecot and something else, QMail I think so I might have a look at that with maybe Squirrel Mail.
As far as the advantages go, for me, I have access to my e-mail quickly from home and when I'm away from home (I port forward so I can get my e-mails from the server via IMAP), I have nearly unlimited storage (got about 8GB of mail, possibly a bit more on my server dating back to 2003) and I can access it easily. The server can pick up my e-mails from my web host and various other e-mail accounts and bung it in one location and I can also provide e-mail accounts to family too (such as my dad).
Granted I could probably do the same with Google Mail (or Hotmail) but at least this way I have full control over my e-mail server.
The dis-advantage is when it goes wrong it's up to me to work out what's gone wrong and fix it. :-)
I suppose it depends how geeky you are. If you have an older PC kicking around you could maybe bung SME Server on it with a couple of big drives in there and have somewhere to store e-mails, photos, videos, music etc. Or you could try going down the route of installing Debian on a box and doing it yourself.
I'm thinking of resurrecting an old Via MiniITX PC for this purpose this weekend, maybe even try and configure it to share my Internet connection so I don't need to use a router (although I do wonder if I might be better with either using a standard router or using something like PfSense or IPCop on a box and then re-configuring my existing server).
Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq