On 28 Feb 2013 08:26, "אנטולי קרסנר" tombackton@gmail.com wrote:

I've written a response to someone else, explaining some issues you mention here.

A little note on UI: we don't need web UI. It's a good addition but unnecessary for the beginning. There are many free-software desktop mail clients. Some are big and complicated, but some are very simple and very easy to use, just like Gmail is. So UI is not a critical issue right now, we just need to be able to easily configure a mail client, e.g. Evolution, to work with the server.

And it's great to hear people like the idea and want to help! With hard work and cooperation, everything is possible!

• Anatoly Krasner

On ד', 2013-02-27 at 18:39 -0500, Bennett Todd wrote:

...

The operational cost is non-zero. Besides hardware, which must include backups, and enough physical diversity to offer availability, an email server is an attractive nuisance; spammers and other criminals constantly attempt sabotage and burglary, and it takes ongoing manpower to attempt to hold them temporarily at bay.

And unless you put hard caps on message sizes, people will use their mailboxes as backup drives, or just email their vacation movies to family, and you'll be buying drives, and hence replacing them, often.

I love the idea, I'm fond of running mailservers myself. But I've gone Google.

As for software, I won't pitch my favorite components to this wide list, but I know how to find all the pieces I'd need except the webmail front-end for the utterly non-technical.

If you limited the scope to IMAP and SMTP, both SSL authenticated, it wouldn't be too hard to spec out.

Host on AWS EC3 or the like, then find an affordable solution to spam, and you can sell to anyone who doesn't expect their email to be private from governments.

Anybody know of a well-engineered and maintained SSL library?

cesmail.net anyone?

Simon