Vpes

After I published Wanted: Virtual Personal Email Servers I got lots of feedback. This is an edited summary of a particularly interesting one, from John of JDPFu.com, reproduced with his permission. My comments and answers are at the end of this page. John’s comments Marco, the Virtual Personal Email Server (VPES) that you recently asked for already exists, but not for end users. There are many pseudo-all-in-1 solutions. To solve your needs, I’d begin with ebox, a small business distro, and maybe look at Amahi for a home inclined distro.

These are the comments I got when I wrote Wanted: Virtual Personal Email Servers: (me:) Today this article was announced on LinuxToday and this is the first comment it got: I didn’t feel like creating an account on his site just to make this comment (where’s OpenID please?) but in case he reads the comments here - the obvious solution is Citadel, which is a nice compact installation that does pretty much everything he’s looking for in a single package.

(update 2010/05/29: here’s another article about VPES legal, management and economics issues) The way email is normally used today has several serious limits that I recently explained in another article. I also pointed out that one of the biggest obstacles to personal email management is lack of user demand for Virtual Personal Email Server (VPES) software and hosting packages. A VPES may run into any computer in your home or in some external datacenter, but that is another issue.