What is the crowd's opinion of Dovecot?

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First, thank you for your service in running your own mail server. A few very large tech companies have taken what used to be a distributed means of communication and nearly concentrated it under the control of a cartel.

I run a mail server on DigitalOcean for a few domains using a fairly standard FreeBSD setup running dovecot and postfix. If you've set up your preferred stack on another hosting provider before, you're aware of all the pitfalls:

• Your server's IP address may have been formerly used by a spammer. When you get your droplet set up, search that IP address's "reputation" in the usual locations. Destroy and rebuild the droplet if its IP has a bad history.

• Your server's IP address is known to be part of a provider's customer allocation, and many large mail hosts (Google and Microsoft, especially) may need convincing (a personal letter from postmaster@ followed up by whatever silly web form they direct you to in the bounce message).

• You need DMARC and SPF at a minimum before large-to-medium providers will even listen to you. ESMTP over TLS using a certificate from Let's Encrypt helps, too.

There's nothing new here that you haven't gone through before. Once you get cert renewal automated, the mail-stack treadmill isn't as bad as some folks claim it is. You just have to have all the pieces perfect and then keep up with updates (easy in FreeBSD or a well-maintained Linux distribution).

Again, seriously, thank you for keeping this flame alive.

If you're used to self hosting, specifically web facing services, then i'd say it won't be too hard for you. Setting up a relatively secure web facing server is going to be you main challenge. As /u/v2345 said it can be complex, while some of the things they mention aren't exactly mandatory.

>I've read that self-hosted email is a pita due to your stuff being flagged/filter by major players like gmail unless you build your reputation.

This is arbitrary compared to the statement mentioned above.

Before that, i'd suggest learning about self hosting things in general, maybe start with setting up a simple lampp server locally and start learning how to configure it. Then start messing with dovecot.

If you want a simple gui setup to get you into self hosting I suggest xampp from apachefriends. Strictly for learning purposes though imo.

I do this for gmail using my selfhosted email server docker-mailserver and fetchmail. You don't really need to use a complete maileserver setup for what you wish to achieve though and could just use the dovecot IMAP server

Yeah it's nuts - they've had the code to add this very basic functionality for years but they won't include it because they want to add a bunch more features first. Typical incompetence from K-9.

I ran into a problem with Dovecot - there's a bug that removes user-defined flags when an email is moved from one folder to another.

https://www.dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot-news/2019-July/000412.html

It's been fixed in the newer versions but my provider isn't running them.

Actually - I have been looking around a little. Seems like the only thing needed is to add Dovecot https://www.dovecot.org/ .
It has both POP3 and IMAP. There is no SMTP in that package. So no problem there.

Am I on the right track? Dovecot reads the mail files and serves it to the different devices.

https://www.dovecot.org/

• set up Dovecot on a local server

• note: AMD Ryzen CPUs are so good and so cheap right now, memory is cheap, SSDs are cheap

• intel plus optane works too

• import the mail hoard, index it

• he can use thunderbird to access it all

• it’s local, so fast

• it’s indexed, so it’s fast

Gonna cost a few hundred bucks

Also: security software to prevent malware . Sorry, but it seems this User might be susceptible to a good spear fishing attack (we all are, but this guy more then most?)

And off site ransomware hardened backup

It seems Exchange is not using X-Auto-Response-Suppress anymore (since Exchange Server 2013, I think).

Even though X-Auto-Response-Suppress is a Microsoft header, other systems, such as the Vacation extension for Sieve, are using it for compatibility with older Microsoft products.