Since 2007, I used the webmail from xs4all.nl and that worked quite well. I only had couple of problems with this setup. For once, after 8 years, it was getting a bit full and I couldn’t get any extra space for that particular E-mail box. Secondly, I had to trust my provider for keeping backups and everything safe.
After a lot of thinking, planning and conniving I made the plans to set up a local webmail service up on my server at home. When the counter on my mailbox went from 98% full to 99% full, the time to take the plunge had arrived. Since this setup poses a few challenges to get going and I needed some structure. I documented everything on my local dokuwiki wiki, so I and maybe other people can get this going and benefit from it. Getting this working took quite a lot of work. Especially the little catches and headaches which needed figuring out. In the end it works quite fine and I’m happy to share my experience.
The page below documents the great outlines and most of the more elusive stuff. The more generic items follow the standard procedures, that you can find all over the internet. If you have any questions, you can pose them below and I’ll update the article. Or just ask me via Twitter @jhaand. The goal was not to present a cook book that every noob could follow. So you still need to figure stuff out for yourself sometimes.
For everyone who wants to have a webmail server at home using Roundcube, Dovecot, running on a Debian system or getting their mail via XS4all using fetchmail. See this wiki page on how I got this done and which little catches you need tackle.
http://zentraedi.nl/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=local_imap
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