Hugo Roy hugoroy@identi.ca

It looks like a good idea to self host a mail server (for me, for my familiy): it's a way of communicate that I really love, supports encryption, and if the server is down, delivery will be retried for several times (even days!). It can be done in a complete free as in freedom software stack.

Email scales beautifully without anybody at the center keeping all of it. We need to make a mail server for people that costs five bucks and sits on the kitchen counter where the telephone answering machine used to be, and that s the end of it. If it breaks you throw it away. ("Snowden and the Future, Part IV: Freedom's Future" by Eben Moglen ) (edited to add a closing parenthesis so I don't go mad)

Eben Moglen says "we need to make" so that means that we are not there yet. Spam fighting, other servers mark your mails as spam, people not remembering your email address, difficult to maintain... Many fears that I would like somebody to tell me that they are only #FUD, but I'm afraid is not so easy as setting up a Wordpress (wink to Mike Linksvayer) or even a Mediagoblin (wink to Christopher Allan Webber). Some of my heroes here, jpope and sazius, host almost their everything but not their email. Many free software communities offer email alias to their full-qualified members, I wonder why an email alias and not an email account, given that it's a so basic need (even Universities offer that to their students) and the communication of the project is based on that in many cases too. Maybe legal reasons?

So, I'm going to try to read a bit about this topic, and maybe do some test installs of mail server. From this lovely pump community, what I would like is:

• Practical experiences (for example, if you run your own mail server, hardware and other kind of needs, the software stack that you use, the good and the bad things).
• Thoughts on that paragraph by Eben Moglen. If agree with it, and if you know projects that are working on that.
• Any other comments that you like :)