i wish some major computer company would release an easy-to-use plug and play server product that would enable consumers to run their own mail servers on cheap hardware, just by toggling a switch
just imagine... no ads, no privacy concerns, complete control.
if they were smart they would include some sort of automatic backup program that runs in the background and saves everything every once in a while, a backup that could be restored with a click of a button... like going back in time ... like a .....
What would happen if I'm on vacation and my apartment loses power, or my ISP-provided DSL modem locks up, or my cat chews on the server's ethernet cable?
If the answer is "you might not receive some email", then that is not an acceptable alternative to hosted email.
Exactly. Or you forget to do backups again and lose 6 months of email...
For 99% of the population, centrally hosted, professionally maintained, email services are vastly superior.
Sure, there will always be those who prefer self-hosting, corporations, the sittin'-inna-tree-with-my-M16 crowd, etc., but it's not really the best option for most.
Spam control requires a little more intervention than with Gmail, but I've found it straightforward enough to set up once, then do nothing else for a couple years.
Because Zimbra only supports Linux, is designed for large enterprises, and requires special client-side programs to be installed just to do things like calendar sync.
It is fine if you control the whole ecosystem, but ironically in most scenarios where that is the case you're running Windows Active Directory anyway so therefore might have well pay a few pennies for Exchange CALs.
Compile this odd package with this patch. Now these three more. Oh they don't compile? That's right, they haven't been maintained for 3 years. Etc, etc.
I created a VPS with CentOS. I think I started with CentOS 5.6 and Zimbra 6.8 Community Version. I last updated it about two years ago, so that it is now CentOS release 5.8 and Zimbra 7.1.1_GA_3196.RHEL5_64.
It intermittently was used by different groups of about 50 people who accessed it using IMAP and the web portal without any problem.
Now all it is doing is continuing to collect email subscriptions from software vendors I was trying out at the time, though some other people may still be using it. I don't think anyone else even knew how to access the administration console, and I haven't logged into the admin console in over a year.
Occasionally, log into the shell, because of a bug I never bothered to address. It slowly collects a lot of temporary files. Speaking of which I should do that now:
`Last login: Sat Sep 1 19:27:28 2012 from __`.
Then I ran:
for i in {0..9}
do
find /tmp/jna${i}*.tmp -cmin +30 -exec rm {} \;
echo $i "out of 9" `date`
done
To be honest, that is ugly, and I should upgrade. The script took 30 minutes to run, and found 20GB that had accumulated in under 5 months. However, it isn't critical for anyone, and < 3hrs/year is a nice level of admin effort.
To answer your question: I'm sure not every module is functioning perfectly, and though it hasn't needed much maintenance over the past year, it hasn't been under much load either.
OS X server has that, though I've not used it so can't comment on how easy it is to set up. It seems like it is pretty easy though. The hardware isn't cheap though, of course.
I'm pretty happy with Kerio Connect (MS Exchange-compatible, so it does push email to iphones/etc.) -- if anyone wants this, we're technically signed up as resellers and can sell you software licensed to host on your own servers.
The web client sucks a bit compared to Google, but otherwise it's essentially Exchange, but vastly cheaper and easier to manage.
just imagine... no ads, no privacy concerns, complete control.
if they were smart they would include some sort of automatic backup program that runs in the background and saves everything every once in a while, a backup that could be restored with a click of a button... like going back in time ... like a .....