My email has been moved a few times over these past few years, just ask my boss, I think two migrations happened while I was doing contract work before I was hired, he must think we do email migrations for fun!
Michael has been running qmail on a Gentoo machine for much of this time, but sometime last year he took Google up on their free beta testing of email hosting for your domain. Bevilacqua.us has hosted email by Google, and I signed up with WallaceAndGromit.net (which didn’t even have email hosting previously). PrincessLeia.com email has happily been run at home, with very occasional outages due to the DSL line being down, our migration to FIOS or power outages. Michael’s tried to push me in the direction of using Google to host email for it but I’ve been reluctant, mostly because I love mutt. Until this week, that is, when I finally resigned myself to admitting that making Michael maintain a whole email server just so I could use mutt was silly. Besides, gmail has pop3, if I hated it too much I could always fetchmail from that into mutt, everybody wins.
So I signed up for Google Apps for your domain which includes a free gmail service that is no longer in selective beta testing. I can add a bunch of users to PrincessLeia.com if I felt so inclined (I don’t) and have 2G of space for my own email account, which is PLENTY. Before we made the DNS changes I spent a few hours bouncing from mutt all of my archived mail, which amounted to 5 years worth, 176M (a whole 8% of the total space Google is giving me at the moment). I figure I can just go on using this forever, or until they stop doing it or start charging outrageous amounts for it.
I haven’t had a ton of time to do configuration on my spiffy new google-hosted email address, but I think I’ll be able to adjust. I’ll miss mutt a lot, and will have to run gmail in basic HTML on my laptop (otherwise it’s just too slow). I’ll dearly miss mutt’s threading (gmails “conversations” just aren’t the same), and folder hooks (automagically using my @ubuntu.com email addy for ubuntu lists, different signatures for different email addresses). Suggestions on how to adjust are welcome, Michael just suggested I check out keybindings so that’s my next task.