[ale] Why Run your own email server?

[Chris Fowler]

> From: "James Taylor" <James.Taylor at eastcobbgroup.com>
> To: "Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts" <ale at ale.org>
> Sent: Thursday, September 29, 2016 11:48:43 PM
> Subject: Re: [ale] Why Run your own email server?

> I've been running my own email server for over 15 years, and doubt spend as much
> as ten hours a year on it.
> If you have the right software configured right, it requires very little
> maintenance. At least for my system.
> -jt

My problem is not dealing with my own email or my father's email. I have our stuff covered. I pay a service for outbound so that blacklisting can be dealt with and I don't worry about. I received too many calls from my dad that one of his customers told him they had not received an email from him. 

My company is a different story. Those guys want MS Exchange type features. They want integration inot our CRM, etc. I've got more important things to do than chase that down so I outsourced that and simply pay an amount per employee per month. Incoming email is a bit complex. Incoming is still maintained by Earthlink. My laziness has maintained that relationship. Fetchmail fetches it, sends it through clamav and spamassassin, backs it up to disk and then sends it to a program I wrote to feed it upstream to our mail system provider. The whole back ip incoming idea stated when I got tired of telling people that accidentally deleted an important email that their email was gone. You know this backup method as simply a procmailrc rule to append the email to a file before processing. 

On my provider's side all email passing between users is send to an external address on the server I just mentioned above and that is backed up. 

I no longer worry about blacklist issues (at least not now). The only time I worry about inbound issues is when the system I designed for inbound emails breaks. One example was when my program sent too much upstream too fast and they blocked it thinking it was a spam attack. I solved that by slowing it down. 
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