[vox-tech] How many people run their own mail server?

[Brian Lavender]

On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 01:30:55PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Tony Cratz (cratz at hematite.com):
> 
> > 	I also use Dovecot with IMAP and mbox. You *do not* need to use
> > 	maildir with IMAP.
> 
> Me, I just ssh direcctly to the MTA box where my mail spool is:  mutt
> runs there 24x7 under a 'screen' session.  Who needs IMAP?  I just read
> and write /var/spool/mail/rick with my MUA directly.
> 
> See, one of the advantages of being in complete control of my Internet
> presence is that I can say 'no' to pointlessly baroque engineering.
> 
> No, that does not give me detached mail.  However, ssh works from
> anywhere in the world that has even small amounts of bandwidth flow.
> And I never have the problem of waiting to sync up over IMAP, nor the
> problem of a piece of mail existing only on the work box when I'm at
> home, or the home box when I'm at work.

I have followed the same approach for quite some time and started
using screen based upon your suggestion at one point. 

But now I think I want to support imap. Sometimes I want to see how an
html email renders in a browser other than lynx and I also would like to
view emails on my phone.  When I look at the dovecot imap configuration
file, it has some parameters where it reads the last portion of the file
rather than reading the whole file.

The following is from the /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf

   When mbox changes unexpectedly we have to fully read it to find out what
   changed. If the mbox is large this can take a long time. Since the change
   is usually just a newly appended mail, it'd be faster to simply read the
   new mails. If this setting is enabled, Dovecot does this but still safely
   fallbacks to re-reading the whole mbox file whenever something in mbox isn't
   how it's expected to be. The only real downside to this setting is that if
   some other MUA changes message flags, Dovecot doesn't notice it immediately.
   Note that a full sync is done with SELECT, EXAMINE, EXPUNGE and CHECK
   commands.

and then there is a config parameter for it.

  mbox_dirty_syncs = yes

The downside is that mbox is super easy to archive. just copy the file and you
are good to go. 

-- 
Brian Lavender
http://www.brie.com/brian/

"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

Professor C. A. R. Hoare
The 1980 Turing award lecture