Mail Setups

[pavel]

Hi,
I have setup exim, dovecot and roundcube with spamfiltering, with semi-virtual
hosting. Mail is delivered to unix acccounts first, then to virtual ones without
any login information.
Reasons for choices:
exim - simple to configure, really modular and flexible. supports postgres
dovecot - supports all protocols I like and was able to configure it with
accessing unix based as well as virtual accounts in one breath. Configuration
file is also very easy to read. Doen't have quirks of Courier IMAP, uses standard
IMAP command set.
roundcube - really simple, ajax/php based mail client. does pretty much all things
i need it to, and not too much more, which is great.
I can use non-web IMAP clients but there isn't much need in that anymore. Unless
you really like to manipulate large amounts of mail in some ways that your particular
client allows you to do. Also webclients don't do offline mail, but thats given.
 

On Fri, 09 Mar 2007 17:37:18 -0500, Brandon Sandrowicz <brandon at tri-coder.org> wrote:
> I'm just wondering what people's mail setups are like.  Do you just POP3
> all your email with fetchmail and use a console client?  Do you just use

POP3 is good for offline mail handling,  other then that I'd use IMAP instead.

> webmail like Gmail or Hotmail?  Do you have email on a hosting service,
> and use IMAP?  Console/GUI email app?  Does your client implement SMTP

Hosting your own mail is preferred, you can get really cheap hosting plans, and
it looks alot more professional.

> or do you use a local server?  If so, is it fully featured like postfix
> or basic like ssmtp?

You can setup mailserver on rogers/bell with smarthost, that will login to the
server and forward mail for all user accounts over authenticated link. It is
a bit of a pain, and unavailability of large provider's mail access is notorious.
Usually its better to run your own service, or have at least a managed one, like
dreamhost at alike. 

> I don't want to start some flame war (console vs. gui or mbox vs
> whatever), I'm just wondering how people on TLUG deal with email.  Just
> something about what you use and why you use it.

Mutt is excellent, but sometimes you just don't have access to the shell
over time i got used to roundcube.

> Personally, I've used things from Apple's Mail.app to Thunderbird to
> Mutt to Pine to Outlook to Outlook Express over the years.  Right now
> I'm using Thunderbird on OS X, but I was using Mutt previously for a
> while.

Mail.app doesn't deal with large folders over IMAP, thunderbird once has cyclical message
bug so I stopped using it then. Anything that fits your requirenments should be ok.
I recommend though for you to check out roundcube though.
 
> An additional question would be how do you deal with Mailing Lists?  I
> know that some people setup specific email addresses for mailing lists.
>   I've even heard of people using a gmail account only for mailing lists
> because they feel it handles them the best (compared to other webmail
> clients I guess).

Separate email addresses for mailing lists is an excellent way to deter spam. I use
procmail to sort most of my mail. Its a bit dated but works well.

Cheers,
       Pavel


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