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

[Bill Broadley]

After catching up on the thread I wanted to mention a few things about mbox:
* Mbox is slow
* Mbox is lock intensive
* Mbox can cause deadlocks.
* Mbox is inefficient to back up
* Mbox isn't friendly to network storage
* Mbox is corruption prone
* Mbox is particularly inefficient for simple things like
   deleting a msg.

I'm quite fond of postfix, dovecot, imap, and maildir when used 
together.  One key part is uding dovecot's delivery to get mail from 
postfix -> dovecot since it's aware of the dovecot indexes.  Dovecot 
deliver is also sieve aware.

Some of the reasons:
* Maildir is just as fast with a 10 message inbox as a 15,000
   msg inbox.
* I can create new email domains with a simple sql statement
* I can create new email addresses with a simple sql statement
* It's VERY fast to sync, 300k email (3GB or so worth) in under
   a second with thunderbird.
* I have no user accounts on my mail server.
* Mail servers without user accounts is more secure than one with.
* It's easy to backup, if I get 1000 email in a day I can
   backup just those.
* Thunderbird makes it easy to keep a local copy of my email so if
   I want to grep, scan, index, or even suck it into some magic
   full text search engine even *gasp* with no network.
* If my server goes up in smoke I only lose email since my last client
   sync
* If my client goes up in smoke I don't lose anything.

With all that said, I'd expect 10 smart people to do it 10 different 
ways, thus are the options when you do it yourself.

Oh for client side sieve editing check out:
   http://wiki.dovecot.org/ManageSieve

I've seen web interfaces for it as well as a thunderbird plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/sieve/