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Comment by Volpe | Hacker News Reader

So this implies there is a market for a simple mailserver that just mimics gmail (or whatever) on your own server:

e.g.

apt-get install gmail-server

Search is IMO the hard part. I know you can do Lucerne, but getting that working well with email is hard. Until recently Outlook's search was crap compared to gmail. too, and mutt is still essentially "headers only".

Still, shouldn't be that hard to do as long as it is your own server and you trust it; I imagine a lot of the difficulty of gmail is scaling, and even a single user with 20-50GB of mail isn't in the same league.

If you were to outsource it to a service provider:

I'd love a way to do privacy-protecting search on my mailbox, either by building/maintaining a local index, or even more amazingly, some kind of cryptographic/data structure magic: do processing once either pre-encryption or on the local device, then add it to an index, with a configurable slider for data leakage vs. search quality. Search could execute locally and remotely.

(This is to allow you to use webmail with no local persistent storage, or a new phone, to search your email on a server, without trusting the server).

Gmail search is actually pretty spotty.

I download my email to the Mac mail app. That has let me find some emails that were unfindable on the web interface (even when I searched by sender email!)

What if there were images on, say, AWS that let you spin up a mailbox instance? Packaging up a standard "I want a mailserver" system might be doable.

doesnt solve alot the issues (blacklists, SSL etc.) and is quite costly for just running email.

But they are solveable. Nice little business idea here.

> and mutt is still essentially "headers only"

Mutt is more like "everything I can come up with from the command line." Sure, I won't make my grandma use it, but I've never needed any searching capability beyond grep and co.

Yeah, I end up grepping organized-by-years Maildirs, but that's somewhat suboptimal.

Ever looked at Mairix?

No, looks interesting, will check it out.

Not necessarily. Try to do something like write up your email in Markdown, and create a script to automatically convert it to multipart/alternative with text and html versions. So far as I can tell the only 'real' way is to insert the script between mutt and the sendmail command, but that's less than optimal.

notmuch for search.

http://notmuchmail.org/

Agreed. I've handled over 100,000 messages with it with no problem, and I know people that have handled well over that. Instant full-text search, no matter how much mail you throw at it.

How about a good old desktop mail client? I don't really understand why so many people insist on only using webmail and then complain about the lack of certain features and/or GMail lock-in.

I've actually wondered this myself. Why isn't there a good preconfigured drop in solution for this? It would be especially nice if it had a good web front-end that you could log into remotely. How hard would it be to develop something like this? I assume it would be a matter of forking an existing project and adding some custom configs. The hard part would be the web component.

Freedom box has talked and hopefully worked on doing this, but Im not sure if they have gotten as far as improving the interface of a webmail yet.

Still, I do think there exist some very talented grafic designers out there that would enjoy playing around with a webmail interface. Hopefully, articles like this will increase the demand and interest in run-it-your-self webmail packages, so one would do that and not spend all focus on building more CMSes.

IIRC, most webmail packages now (SquirrelMail, RoundCube) are just web front-ends to IMAP. It stands to reason that something more integrated, is probably more difficult.

There already are several solutions like this that have been around for years. Check out Zimbra. But still a pain to maintain and moving over to Google Apps several years ago, I never looked back.

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