Preservation of correspondence

[Jim Brain]

>> If anyone has any suggestions for good ISP-independent email services
>> then let me know; the reason I've used yahoo for years is so that I
>> don't get tied to a single ISP for receiving email, but there are
>> doubtless better offerings around...
>>     
>
> Probably.  My approach to that is to run my own mailserver (static IPs
> and no administrative prohibitions on mailservers are non-optional to
> me when selecting a connectivity provider).  Not to say that that
> approach is suitable for everyone, of course - I've seen it said often
> enough that there are good mail-handling services out there, but as
> I've never wanted one, I've never looked into any in detail.
>   
I'm not sure if my solution is useful to you, but I use an internal 
mailserver at the house. However, it can;t be primary, since it is only 
on residential broadband.  So, I use fetchmail to grab my mail from the 
current ISP hosting my jbrain.com domain.

Benefits:

    * My mail sits on my box. 
          o No worrying about hosting providers going belly up and
            ditching my mail (been there, done that)
          o I can set up local spam rules and such once, no matter how
            many times I switch ISPs or mail providers.
          o I can run webmail on my local box, exported to the greater
            Internet, which allows me to read email while on the road
            without the ads. SquirrelMail is nice for this, though there
            are others.
          o I can read via elm on the local box.  GUI email apps are
            nice, but sometimes a terminal session and elm will get
            through when nothing else will (or be reasonably speedy)
    * I can switch ISPs/hosting companies at will.  All I need from them
      is a POP3 mailbox
    * It was easy to setup, in Linux/UNIX, anyway.  UW IMAP,
      SquirrellMail, Fetchmail, are all pretty mature.

I also use OpenVPN on the home network to tunnel into it for IMAP access 
when away from home, but you could open IMAP to the world if you were OK 
with that (I was not).

Jim