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I would like to set up a personal email server. I am currently using Gmail, but I am becoming increasingly concerned at the amount of data that I share with Google. I would like to migrate all of my email to my personal server.

Is there an easy to use, secure, open source alternative to Gmail that can be ran on personal servers? I do not need a web interface to my email as I usually access it via IMAP.

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Email is easy. Anti-spam will be your biggest problem. – SysAdmin1138 Jan 9 '11 at 5:46
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migrated from serverfault.com Jan 9 '11 at 10:34

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5 Answers

up vote 7 down vote accepted

As @sysadmin1138 commented, spam and filtering is going to be the biggest obstacle. I would second the recommendation of Zimbra, but suggest that if you can spare another box (or some virtual space on the same box) set up a Mailcleaner mail gateway/filter to receive, scrub, and relay mail to the Zimbra server.

Mailcleaner is an Exim-based filtering solution with a web frontend that nicely wraps up lots of great open-source tools. It's no harder to set up than Zimbra or Scalix, and enabling even just some of the SMTP-time RBLs will cut down on your spam volume significantly. Other important stuff like Razor, Pyzor, and DCC can be configured to scrub further. ClamAV is built in as well.

Both Zimbra and Mailcleaner play well with virtualization options like VMWare (who now owns Zimbra) and KVM -- IMO a Linux box running Mailcleaner and Zimbra guests on KVM would be a great, no-cost home/personal email server setup.

Lastly, if you plan to run this on a residential or home Internet connection you'll likely need to look into dynamic DNS to set up forward and reverse mail records unless you have a static IP. You should also contact your ISP or take a gander at their terms of service to determine if they will have an issue with hosting your own email server.

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+1 for mentioning residential internet concerns. Many ISPs also block port 25 from getting out of their network, so running an SMTP server is often out of the question. – afrazier Jan 9 '11 at 12:48
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up vote 6 down vote

Look into Zimbra open source edition.

http://www.zimbra.com/downloads/os-downloads.html

I run it as a personal mail solution. It has a web interface, but I never interact with it. For me, it's strictly an IMAP system for my preferred mail clients. I switched from 8 years of sendmail+imap/dovecot.

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+1 Zimbra is pretty awesome. – JamesBarnett Jan 9 '11 at 7:10
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up vote 6 down vote

The following page contain very detailed tutorials on how to setup email servers on Linux:

http://library.linode.com/email/postfix/

The tutorials cover pretty much every email solution for Linux (with the exception of qmail).

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up vote 4 down vote

Windows: SmarterMail or Ipswitch iMail. Both have free editions and will work great for personal mail.

Linux: Exim or Postfix. These take some time to get setup especially with IMAP. A more fully-featured solution would be something like Zimbra or Scalix (both of which also offer free community editions)...

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I like Postfix. – Randolph West Jan 9 '11 at 5:19
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up vote 3 down vote

On Windows, I've been very fond of hMailServer and MDaemon.

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