After more than 15 years (I haven’t recorded exactly when I started with Red Hat) of running an active mail server here, I’ve decided now that I don’t need to.

When I started all that, broadband was slower, and Internet hosts had poorer anti-spam measures, so the combination of LAN-speed access to mail, leaving the server to send it in the background, and Spamassassin providing industrial strength spam scanning made it useful, and not having a network-connected printer or shared file storage meant Samba came in too.

It started as a cheap desktop PC, and since 2008 it’s been a laptop with a busted screen, sitting in a quiet cupboard, occasionally getting switched off my an exploring cat. Other than that, in typical Linux style, it’s just worked, almost 24x7x365 since then, with maybe a hard disk upgrade once.

This did, however, mean a bit of complexity: to have full, always-working email on a phone would have meant all sorts of tricks with PAT, and other stuff, and then there’s always the risk of blowing it up when you try an upgrade. I did have plans to build a new version, do it all again, and include that, when instead, I looked at how much spam is getting through.

The answer is: not much, so the hosting co must be doing a good job.

So with that, the “server” will be retired, and I think a Raspberry Pi will take it’s place (it is useful to have a shell-accessible Linux machine you’re superuser of at times).