Reconfiguring How I Do Email

Last night's fireworks finally provided the impetus for me to change how I get my email. I've been running mail.building-tux.com as an IMAP server on e-Smith SME server for a few years at home, but have been looking to move to a platform that isn't so old. One of the things I was considering was to stop hosting my mail at home entirely, and instead use pair.com's server, which is where www.building-tux.com is hosted.

Being in a real data center, Pair's server is a lot less vulnerable to power outages and surges. They provide webmail access using Squirrelmail, so even if I'm without my laptop I'll be able to access it from any Internet connection. Pair's spam filtering is quite good; I noticed that when they made some upgrades to it last year the amount of spam I received in my davemarkowitz.net account plummetted. Finally, not running a server 24x7 will save on our home electric bill.

So, I setup a mailbox at Pair and reconfigured the DNS records for building-tux.com. I'm now using POPS (POP over SSL) to retrieve email for both building-tux.com and davemarkowitz.net. My mail client is Apple's Mail.app.

I like Mail.app's interface and how it integrates well with iCal, the OS X Addressbook, and Spotlight. Mail.app sucks for IMAP but according to friends who use it for POP, it's good at that.

Tonight or this weekend I'll configure Mail.app to connect to my old mail server while I'm local, and I'll copy down the messages I have in IMAP folders. Then I'll be able to retire the old box.