Reviewing Mail Servers – why? To find out where the state of the art is since last time I checked. This is what blogging is to me – its not always about selling some service or some product. I’ve blogged for free since I ever heard of blogging. Its just a reflection of what happened at this time to add to the history to look at later perhaps, or not.

When Gmail came out – tentatively we all started to test it, sign up as beta users. We could invite friends into the program and I ended up with a 1000 user account with Google for their apps service to provide non-profit users with email and all the Google Apps as a business unit. It meant a lot less worry, and offloading server admin to Google. Also that people had everything there for them to find their way to using to integrate many things instead of pressing for an internal mail to integrate better with all the google tools.

So why would I go back and make a mail server. Mostly, because I there is so much tax and over-commercialization. People want to turn everything into a higher cost than it is perhaps worth. Still it will take me considerable management effort but when it comes to security then it will be in my hands. Security and restoring backups are not in your hands with a 3rd party provider. If they experience serious down time you will have to wait.

Google hasn’t had much downtime for years – that was lucky. I guess in the end we want a hybrid – something independent that also integrates. Yet there are so many more messaging services today – chat’s are almost replacing email, but not quite yet.

—- Update —

I’m going to install and try out mailcow – that seems low cost and useful, is getting developed at a good pace.