I had been a paying Google Apps customer for personal and corporate use since the service was in beta. Until several weeks ago, that is. I was about to set up another Google Apps account for a new project when I stopped to consider what I would be funding with my USD $50 per user per year
This is exactly how I feel about Google Apps. I used to recommend it to customers, now I hesitate to recommend it, even though the alternatives aren't as easy or fully-featured without a lot more work. Thanks to the author for setting this lot up, I'll definitely be looking at it, and possibly using a few of the pieces.
Ansible is great though; even if you're not setting up your own private cloud it's worth taking a look at for deployment. AnsibleWorks really should set up an extensive library of playbooks like this, each isolated so that they can easily be mixed and matched. Their examples were a bit limited and specific last time I looked.
Does anyone have any tales of using Dovecot (good or bad), as I'm considering installing it?
I ran a Postfix/Dovecot setup for years and they were both fast, reliable, lightweight, and very flexible. The #dovecot and #postfix channels on Freenode are also tremendously helpful if you are in a pickle. (Full disclosure, I don't run my own mail server anymore except for a few virtual aliases; a good webmail client was the weak link in the chain and Fastmail provides a reliable service with a phenomenal web client at a fair price).
I was using Roudcube, but it was not powerful enough for my needs. The greatest strength of the Fastmail UI are all of the built-in keybindings. There's one for almost every action, indeed, I find it friendlier than the best desktop clients I've used, let alone ones like Gmail or Roudcube.
I've been using it on a server at home to basically archive my email (since the account I use to receive new email gets fussy if it gets too full) for a number of years now; it's worked great for me. I particularly like the fact that as of version 2.0, it supports sieve filtering out of the box, including a ManageSieve server, so I can easily set up complex filtering rules.
Thanks. Filters sound interesting too. Probably spam filtering would be my biggest concern moving from google apps, I don't really care about the webmail.
People seem to think that if you move your domain off GApps you're suddenly going to receive so much spam that your inbox will blow up. This is not so at all.
A decent Postfix configuration + up2date SpamAssassin can do wonders. One of the "secrets" is to train Spamassassin.
What I do for example is to move all the spam I receive in my inbox to a special folder that I later run "sa-learn --spam" on from a cronjob. You don't even need a webmail/interface for this.
I agree with you entirely that hosting your own mail doesn't mean drowning in spam. After many years hosting my own mail, I find the most effective anti-spam measures are (in order):
1. RBL: zen.spamhaus.org. This kills 95% of incoming spam.
2. Greylisting. This catches the 4.99% of stuff that gets through zen.spamhaus.org
3. SpamAssassin: Everything else. The last time spam got this far appears to have been over a year ago.
The RBL is pretty trivial to set up in postfix, and there is an effective greylist implementation included by default nowadays. Between these two alone, I get less spam in my own mail than I do in gmail..
1 - try not to use greylisting (it can be quite annoying some time when you are waiting for an important email)
2 - RBLs should be used from within SpamAssassin in such a way that it raises the spam score, not directly in the MTA. There are loads of "good" addresses listed in RBLs due to carelessness and/or incompetence of the operators.
You can set up procmail to auto-run a program when you add/remove messages on IMAP folders. I use it to auto-train my crm114 spam catcher (by dragging emails mostly from "Maybe Spam" to "Absolutely Spam" but it works the other way too: when you drag an email from Maybe Spam to Inbox, it trains that message as Not Spam).
Mail Avenger will cut down a good amount of the spam by itself, and waste the spammers' resources too. And honestly having some remaining spam is useful for detached gauging of pop culture. The subjects aren't actually too different from mainstream marketing pitches.
fully agreed. i've been running my own mailserver for a decade. theres a bunch of accounts on it, the domains are also well known.
I get generally little spam. I use exactly the same spam assassin training, if ever i get a spam, i put it in my inbox/not-detected dir, this will get autoindexed, and this kind of spam never comes again.
Also, it requires next to zero maintenance. (of course I KNOW how to setup dovecot and what not, but once setup, I've basically nothing to do, basically, ever)
This is exactly how I feel about Google Apps. I used to recommend it to customers, now I hesitate to recommend it, even though the alternatives aren't as easy or fully-featured without a lot more work. Thanks to the author for setting this lot up, I'll definitely be looking at it, and possibly using a few of the pieces.
Ansible is great though; even if you're not setting up your own private cloud it's worth taking a look at for deployment. AnsibleWorks really should set up an extensive library of playbooks like this, each isolated so that they can easily be mixed and matched. Their examples were a bit limited and specific last time I looked.
Does anyone have any tales of using Dovecot (good or bad), as I'm considering installing it?