I’m what you would call the last of the hold-outs. Until a year or so ago, I read my email almost exclusively with the command line/curses client “mutt”. I’d been using mutt since transitioning from the previous reigning command line/curses mail client “elm” around 1998 or so. I stubbornly continued using mutt for several reasons, not least of which was that I could ssh home and read my email on my own account on my own server, and have the same user experience whether I was home or at work. A year or so ago, work cut off my ability to ssh home.
I settled on a bizarre combination to replace it: I have a GMail account I can access at work. My home email is accessable through IMAP, and I read it at home with Thunderbird on my laptop, and on the go with SnapperMail on my Treo. I subscribed to all my high traffic mailing lists using my GMail account so I can read them when I’m at work. But because I’m stubborn, I’ve refused to unsubscribe them at home, and so-far have insisted on reading them with Thunderbird. Which leads to vast amounts of wibbling about trying to keep the two accounts synchronized – mostly by using my Treo to mark as read and deleted all the articles that I’d already read on my GMail account and the like.
But this is starting to drive me crazy. So as of today, I’m reluctantly giving up and unsubscribing my xcski.com accont from the mailing lists. I’m going to read them on GMail whether I’m home or at work. All that remains to be seen is:
- Should I forward my non-mailing list traffic from xcski.com to GMail?
- Or should I just give up running my own mail server entirely and sign up for “GMail For My Domain” or whatever the hell they call it?
If I take the last option, it would be sad to shut down my mail server. I’ve been doing mail service for a long long time and I was proud of how well it worked and how well the spam protection worked. Plus I’m not sure how the various daemons on my system that send email will work with GMail. Oh well, at least my mailing list mail server will continue to run.
Argghhhh.
I say soldier on, soldier. Not sure why, but I hate to see the changing of the guard. I still read net news on nn, on the rare occasions I venture in, but you lot were important to me in the dark ages of my newbieness and I’d hate to see you sign up entirely with The Borg.
K. [and my opinion should count for what? nada?]
Ah, you fscker.
K.
I had been running our mail server out of our house for eight or nine years, until last November. It got to be too much of a PITA dealing with the spam, massive DOS attacks, and so on. So I moved to using Google Apps for Domains.
It was completely painless, and has worked wonderfully. If you do it, sign up for a Premier account so that you can use their IMAP mass-import tool to suck in your existing mail, and then downgrade to the free version.
I’m unhappy with gMail’s spam filtering, so what I do is run my own mail server, which filters mail and forwards the non-spam to gMail. Then I use the gMail web client at the office (where IMAP is blocked) and sync my phone via IMAP to the gmail account. That way I still get to use my vanity domain, and do my filtering, but I only actually sync to the gMail account.
If a mailing list exposes your address to spam harvesters, using a gmail address might come in handy.
My spam has been minimal since i turned on postgrey on my mailserver.
If i couldn’t ssh out of work, then i’d probably just wait to get home to read my mail.
I’m still resisting gmail, even though I have an account. Why should I give Google my content as free fodder for their advertising engine? I use my Dreamhost IMAP service and check my mail using Mail.app at home and Pocket Outlook on my phone. Server-side mail filtering keeps my mail neat and organized. It’s much more convenient for me than using Gmail.
Karen, I don’t understand your “fscker” comment. This isn’t an April Fools joke.
Rone, turning on postgrey has done almost nothing for me. Although one interesting tidbit – if you try to unsubscribe from mails from democrats.org, they send you a “confirmation code” that you need to put into a web site, but that code email doesn’t retry if postgrey refuses it!
I have been using Google’s hosted domain email thing for dewis.ca for a now and it works quite nicely. I have been thinking about moving pinetree.org there, too, but that’s a little more complicated because there are mailing lists hosted in pinetree.org, though I could just create lists.pinetree.org and move the lists into it.
I haven’t had a whole lot of complaints about the spam filters on GMail, so far.
Oh, OK. I saw the date and was sure it was, too late. Still think there’s value in not giving up, though I can’t accurately gauge your frustration level.
K.
I had very good luck with Postgrey a couple of years ago, and then in the last year, it became all but useless. The spam engines have gotten wise to the need for retries. That, plus getting 1 – 3K spam emails/day to my home box put me over the edge.
Gmail’s spam filtering has worked very well for me, with the glaring exception of one mailing list that it insisted on always flagging as spam, until I put a “This is not spam, ever” filter in place for it. Otherwise, I’m very happy with it. And since I access it just via IMAP, I never see the Gmail ads.
I forward all of my mail into Google, and I’m *averaging* five *thousand* spam messages per day into my gmail spam folder (actually down from 7.5K/day earlier in the year). Reading mail on my own machine has become virtually impossible. I only run my own mail server as a last-ditch place in case gmail leaves me without email.