No thanks, Google—we've got Ubuntu

Why not keep your e-mail to yourself as well? It's not that hard to do.

@Sander

I was keeping my e-mail on my own server. But to get better service I switched providers and lost my fixed IP. I know I can make my server work all the same, but I also came to the realization as I changed e-mail addresses once again I just want to leave it as a gmail account.

Then even when I move back to Canada from Europe it still remains the same. Plus using several computers I run gmail as imap to access it from anywhere.

> Plus using several computers I run gmail as imap to access it from anywhere.

That's one of the good things about horizontal diversification: Clients who want one particular service, but not another, can still remain customers.

Many of my colleagues pipe their company e-mail through Gmail and access it that way.

I wanted more control over my e-mail but wasn't quite ready to use Gmail for that purpose, so I started POP-ing it down and using Thunderbird to read/reply/manage it.

That's been working out pretty well. I configured Thunderbird to leave the last two weeks' worth of mail on the server, so I can use my company's Web-mail interface for recent mail if I'm not on the machine with the Thunderbird install.

I know one guy who pipes the e-mail through Gmail but also POPs down a copy. That could be a way to go.

Even though I'm writing quite a bit about Google Docs (and Chrome OS and other Google stuff) lately, I do grant that there are privacy and marketing issues, and that another vendor who's not Google or Microsoft might be a better choice for either cloud applications or storage.

Quoting:as I changed e-mail addresses once again I just want to leave it as a gmail account.

Then even when I move back to Canada from Europe it still remains the same. Plus using several computers I run gmail as imap to access it from anywhere.

Get your own domain name. It's only $4-$7 a year. Use DynDNS or something similar to point it to your dynamic IP address. Pick any old box and install exim + fetchmail + dovecot imap and you have your own imap server with your own e-mail address. There are several great webmail packages you could install as well, but many people I know simply run a commandline imap client like Pine in an SSH shell. Far more secure :-)

WRT email practices:

I empty the POP account at the end of the month, downloading to Alpine (formerly Pine). I use the web interface for all sending, but I'm willing to download into Thunderbird to view as the sender's program might expect (esp. with inline images involved).

And I keep all my non-spam messages, going back 8 years so far. It's amazing how many times I've dug through the archives to find some obscure thing.

Quoting:Get your own domain name. It's only $4-$7 a year. Use DynDNS or something similar to point it to your dynamic IP address. Pick any old box and install exim + fetchmail + dovecot imap and you have your own imap server with your own e-mail address. There are several great webmail packages you could install as well, but many people I know simply run a commandline imap client like Pine in an SSH shell. Far more secure :-)

Sander, that's good advice. I'm doing something similar but different: I've started using the mail server for my Hostgator account. I have an e-mail account on my own domain, and I access it via IMAP in Thunderbird.

Re: Pine ... I tried to make Mutt work years ago, but it was just too much trouble. I'm way, way not worthy for such a geekish pursuit (i.e. crafting a .muttrc that does what I need it to do, then figuring out procmail, fetchmail, etc.)

Using your own imap server which uses maildir (like dovecot) has a few perks. Easy backup with rsync (old messages never change, so fast backups) and tools like Tracker can index them. Also:

$ cd Maildir $ grep -r -C 5 "foo" *

:-)

One of the biggest drawbacks of POP mail in Thunderbird is that it takes forever to rsync.

Yep, that's the downside of mbox for mail storage. Every new mail causes the mbox to change so you need to rsync the entire file again. And they can get big (over 1 GB for my largest at the moment. That's why I now have Cat6 and Gigabit network at home).

I'm running two rsync scripts, one for Thunderbird and the other for ... everything else. It's the only way to maintain whatever sanity I have left.

Quoting:Get your own domain name. It's only $4-$7 a year.

what Sander said

How very interesting.

I use "rsync -zavvP --delete" to keep my Slackware repositories current. One of the files is the MANIFEST.bz2, sorted and compressed.

Somehow, it can tell that only part of the MANIFEST.bz2 file needs to be transferred. That is, if "a/coreutils-i486*.txz" is updated, most of MANIFEST.bz2 is re-downloaded, because "a/" is the first directory in the list. However, if "xap/mozilla-firefox-i486*.txz", then MANIFEST.bz2 gets a very fast update, because the "xap/" files are near the end of the list.

I'll admit, I don't know how the mbox format works. For my Alpine archives, I separate by month/year, and sent vs. received. It keeps the folders broken down into manageable chunks.

@Steven: Have you compressed your Thunderbird folders?

For the dynamic option there are autoupdaters for you as well, I use ddclient. dyndns.com has an auto gen for you configuration file for it as well, so all you have to do is drop it in and set it as a system service on your outward facing server (if you have dedicated one to that function).

I use the free service at no-ip.com to point to my in-home server (the commercial service has more features, but I'm cheap). No registered domain needed if you don't want.

Well, I was also looking at this from a physical advantage point as well. I have to travel at times for extended periods. Either for my work or for vacations and such. If my mail server fails (or the router which happened to me once) my mail can be lost. If a provider is holding my mail for me I don't have to worry about that.

Yes, I could still use a mail server and just fetch my mail from the provider, but I don't see much advantage right now to increasing my work environment at home. I have enough at work. :)

Maybe when I retire in a few years.

Besides, if I tried to tell the wife we were changing her mail system again I think I'd be retired early.

Quoting:Somehow, it can tell that only part of the MANIFEST.bz2 file needs to be transferred.

rsync does delta transers. That is, it sends only the diffs between files. When you use rsync between local filesystems then it doesn't do this because figuring out the delta usually takes longer than transferring the entire file on a local filesystem.

For you, the problem is the bzip2 compression. When a file is tacked onto the end, the file doesn't change much. When a file is added to the beginning then the compression causes almost the entire file to change. I bet your transfers would be much faster when your manifest was uncompressed.

As for Thunderbird's mbox, I have no idea why the entire file needs to be transferred. Mbox should only tack stuff on at the end, and rsync should be able to send just the difference but for some reason it doesn't do that. Perhaps the file size is too big for rsync to diff properly, or Mozilla's mboxrd file format is just different enough from standard mbox.

Well, since I'm no longer using a networked setup, I just rsync my /home/gus3 to a partition on a different drive. A full transfer (backup or recovery) takes about 45 minutes, and both partitions are encrypted. No network involved, so compression would just slow things down unnecessarily.

Does rsync automatically transfer only the changed part of a file, or do you have to do that in a switch with the command?

Steven, it should do that automatically.