I want to find a new Email host, but there is more to it...

Alright everyone out there I have a troubling question about email hosting that has been bothering me for a long time: How and where do I host my email for how much?

I know a lot of people us Gmail, I believe the whole lifehacker team and several other important groups of people are on Gmail/Gapps and the host of products from google. My own school(University) is entirely Google Apps now as well. I do not want to be on Gmail for two reasons.
1) I know they are reading my emails and I do not like it. I do not like that they are creating these personal profiles of me and I have no real control and no promise of control. The trust google could have had before has been destoryed by their own actions which was documented in a gizmodo article I have lost the link to

2) I have spent an incredible amount of time getting my self off gmail and using my website's email. I also have spent an incredible amount of time looking in to alternatives for calendar systems and contact management. I want to stop giving them my information but that is kind of hard when no one else seems to provide any of those services even for a price.

Here is the catch-22 which is why "use your website's email" won't work. Besides the fact that the email is sort of flaky at times, which I understand and was due to some real problems, I do not know it's "secure" on the server. I'm not really conversing in state secrets but I want to have this avalible. But also more importantly I am planning on moving my website to github to use Jekyll for a cms and closing my hosting account which prevents me from using my email anymore with my old hosting provider.

I would pay for a service but I do not know of what service I should use, if I should simply do something else... etc.

I am not looking for a hushmail type of email hosting. I want to keep my domain and simply change hosting without too much limitation in space. I looked in to countermail.com which seems to fit the bill perfectly although kind of expensive they seem to provide a great service. That said, it's not verifiable that they do any of the things they say and I've sent them an email about it.

I have also pondered about running my own mail server at home and whether or not that is a reasonable idea. I have full control over my domain so I could just point the email entries at my house. I have a 20M/b Comcast connection. I have an Ubuntu 11.10 server already connected to the outside (only for ssh on a nonstandard port) which I can setup for email pretty easily. I have heard that Linus Tovalds even has a setup that doesn't let him have email outside his house for security reasons which I am not sure of.

Help me out guys, it'd be greatly appriciated

You need to ask yourself whether you want to manage your own mail server, if so then you need to look into anti-spam measures and configure your server to relay all outbound emial through your ISP's mail servers (otherwise you'll get blocked by recipient email systems as you look like a spammer). I'd also recommend that you go with postfix, it's pretty secure out of the box and is easy to get running with basic functionality.

With the range of criteria you require I'd host it.

Positives: No monthly hosting charges, No corporate snooping, Owning your own box.

Negatives: Hardware Failures, Technical difficulties and Administration

Alternatively you could go the VPS route for 20 bucks a month, which saves a lot of hassle due to most ISP's blocking outbound email traffic. You still deal with technical difficulties and administration but you are guaranteed 99.9 percent uptime. I host with Linode and configuring email can be a bitch at first but administration is nearly non-existent once things start running smoothly.

You really have to weigh your technical abilities vs your desire for something to run nice and smooth out of the box and decide from there.

If you host your own server (like a boss), look into Zimbra for a full solution that includes calendaring and all the other goodies most people want out of their email experience.

I thought the same way, but uptime was the issue keeping me from doing it. The internet goes out here quite often (at least for seemingly stupid reasons). I would perfer to host on my own box but I might have to host with a VPS (which wouldn't be bad for any future website I host on that server. I am a web dev, moving in to RoR atm)

I really like the Zimbra, I never even knew that existed and seems like a really awesome solution... however also sounds pretty difficult to setup it seems? I am very capible and comfortable with *nix so I am pretty sure I could handle it.

Currently I'm using a combination of Postfix, Dovecot and Squirrelmail. I've never dealt with Zimbra personally but the tutorials look straight forward. Its kind of an all-in-one package where they combine all the components of a mail server into one installation and ask you questions about your configuration as you go.

This has its advantages and drawbacks accordingly. Usually these packages are easy to setup but when you cram this kind of functionality into one installation, they tend to be heavy hitters when it comes to system resources, primarily memory. Your average VPS will usually only come with about 512 megs of memory and anything above that starts getting pricy. Just a consideration when you decide.

If you didn't need calendaring I'd recommend a similar configuration to what I'm doing. Postfix, Dovecot and Squirrelmail are all separate programs and designed under the Linux philosophy to do one thing well and work well with other pieces of software. I have only 512 megs of RAM on my VPS but plenty to spare.

That sounds appealing. I was thinking of making my own calendar thing in RoR. Not that nessiasarily synced or anything, but provided a calendar online w/ tasks so I can manage my day. Zimbra looks really nice and I really like how it works, but I thought was going to be though to just run that on 512mb too.

A major issue is comcast does have some pretty big DNS blackouts/issues. So I don't think that local server hosting will work for me, although I might...

Let's say for theory's sake I did need calendaring(maybe tasks too) but wasn't using Zimbra and used you VPS what would you recommend in addition to Postfix, Dovecot, and Squirrelmail?

Actually upon further research, Squirrelmail does support a calendar and the capability to share the calendar with multiple users with additional plugins. Its nothing fancy but gets the job done.

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/...-levels/152684

Here's a list of all supported plugins.

http://squirrelmail.org/plugins_cate...ategory_id=all

I download all my email (ISP and hosted domains) to a local machine and read and archive it there. Whether you realize it or not, e-mail left sitting on a server somewhere (in the US at least) can be considered abandoned documents and can be perused at leisure by those either in positions of authority without a warrant or by those with the right connections/abilities to gain access. It's a security hole most people neglect to consider.

hostmonster.com. Been using them for a few years and have not had any problems.