After a bunch of emails went AWOL this week (thanks, gmail. thgmail) I realized I couldn’t procrastinate any longer, and moved some of my critical email accounts back onto my own server. That involved setting up:

• Apache + SSL/TLS – Van’s walkthrough is intelligent and accurate, and even goes into client-site certificates (which I’ve enforced)
• Dovecot for imap – the basic QuickConfig is sufficient, though I have discovered I cannot bind imap (non-SSL) only to localhost on this system, possibly due to the way virtual hosts are done. So it’s global imaps for everyone, which is fine naturally.
• RoundCube – gmail’s only true competition in the OSS webmail space, which is sad in a way. Kinda proves that people care more about “free as in beer” than “free as in speech.” Oh well. It’s not horrible, but it’s not as nice. And I still like it better than Thunderbird.

The big danger, of course, is that I’ll be missing out on gmail’s awesome anti-spam abilities. I’ll just have to see how well it fares over time. (Right now, the migrated email addresses aren’t public, so I’m feeling positive.)

Now that I’m done shaving yaks, I can get back to my schoolwork.