[Discuss] Running a mail server, or not

[Derek Martin]

On Thu, Jun 28, 2018 at 04:16:50PM -0400, Dan Ritter wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 28, 2018 at 02:09:57PM -0500, Derek Martin wrote:
> > On Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 04:07:23PM +0000, Rich Braun wrote:
> > > Derek Martin <invalid at pizzashack.org> raised a couple more interesting points:
> > 
> > The trick is usually access.  Like I have no way to SSH into my
> > server at the moment...  Technically I can do it from my phone, but
> > I've found trying to do anything non-trivial on the phone is extremely
> > tedious and time consuming, so while it can be done, not in the amount
> > of time that wouldn't be extremely awkward while you're dealing with a
> > sales clerk or whatever...
> 
> So that's why you run dovecot on your server for IMAP access on
> port 993, and K9mail or whatever on your phone.

I think I mentioned my setup is really complicated...  That includes
having mailboxes in multiple mail formats, which, last I checked
dovecot could not deal with (it supports all the ones I use, just not
simultaneously, unless that's changed).  The reasons for this are
partly related to Mutt (historically new mail processing worked
differently for different mail store formats) and partly performance
related (different operations are faster on mbox than maildir, and
vice versa).  So I chose mail stores based on my access pattern and
desired notification behavior for the given folder...

http://does-not-exist.org/mail-archives/mutt-users/msg18190.html
http://mutt-users.mutt.narkive.com/OE3ugjuM/is-it-safe-to-use-mbox
http://www.blu.org/pipermail/discuss/2003-September/017386.html

Much of these issues have long since been resolved with some effort
spent on new mail handling, better caching implementations and file
systems that better handle large numbers of small files, and other
such things.  I could of course redesign my whole mail scheme (and at
this point, probably should) but just forwarding "important" messages
to gmail was a whole lot easier.  Someday...

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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