email identity crisis

[lars at larsshack.org (Lars Kellogg-Stedman)]

> I was really curious to know, though, what other people did with their
> email... what do you do with yours?

I forward all of my mail to a single address.  At the moment, I'm using 
my ATT Broadband account.  I prefer to have this single address be an 
external mail server (e.g., not one running in my house), for reasons of 
reliability and convenience (I don't want mail to start bouncing if I'm 
fiddling with system configurations, and I don't want to lose remote 
access due to a power failure, system crash, etc).

However, since I want to be able to read it from anywhere, this rules 
out the AT&T POP servers as a final destination, since POP is a 
miserable protocol for anyone who reads mail from more than one 
computers.  I like to have all my mail folders available to me, as well, 
and POP has absolutely no support for server-side folders.

So, I run an IMAP mail server at my house.  The mailserver periodically 
runs fetchmail to download any new mail from AT&T and injects it into my 
local IMAP server.  This means:

(1) If I shut down, reinstall, blow up, or otherwise disable my home 
system, mail delivery will continue uninteruppted to my AT&T account.

(2) As long as my home connection is up and running, my mail is 
available on an IMAP server than I can access from anywhere, from any 
IMAP capable software or device.

(3) I can use procmail for mail filtering.

(4) I can connect securely using IMAP over SSL, or IMAP over SSH.  This 
is of particular importance to me when connecting to my mail from an 
"insecure" environment, such as a trade show floor.

It works well, and the poll-with-fetchmail gives me a large amount of 
flexibility with my home systems.  I can reinstall, upgrade, power down, 
  whatever, without worrying about mail.

-- Lars