All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Mail spool that saves emails for a few days after they are deleted
I store my email in maildir and MH formats and synchronize them across
computers with duplicity. I also don't trust myself to run servers, so
I prefer to use managed hosting.
I seek an email host that works like this.
- I point my MX records to it.
- The host delivers mail over POP or something similar.
(Forwarding might work instead.) - Emails are saved for a few days after being deleted over POP.
With such a host I could use the following workflow.
- Someone sends me an email, and the email host receives it.
- When I have an internet connection, I download the email on my laptop
and mark it as deleted on the server. - I synchronize the emails on my laptop with my separate backup server.
If my laptop fails before I complete this backup, I have a few days
to recover the recent emails from the email host.
With my present host, Fastmail, I could maybe accomplish something like
this with a sieve filter that makes a copy of the email, but that seems
unnecessarily complicated. Also, I wouldn't have an automatic way to
delete the emails as far as I could tell, though that isn't such a big
deal. It mostly just seems unnecessarily complicated.
The easiest alternative I have found is an MX backup service, such as
the one included in afraid.org's premium membership, but such a service
does not meet my third criterion of saving emails for a few days after
they are delivered.
Comments
Why do you not want to store your emails on the server and sync with IMAP?
Have a look in your mail client to Keep/Delete e-mails on the server for xDays.
A few of our shared hosting clients use that to keep mobile devices sync'd over IMAP and then is stored on their desktop/laptop via POP and then removed off the server some weeks later.
The main disadvantage of my preferred mail client, nmh, is that it can receive mail only from the mail drop or by POP3. It also doesn't have the option to keep emails for a few days, but maybe that feature would be easy to implement.
One option is to use a cPanel host with Email Archiving enabled.
Damn, mh! You are a stud.
If memory serves, mh keeps everything in a mailbox folder with each message in a separate file...? Been a long time since I used mh but couldn't you...
have a cron job that tars up the dir once a day/twice a day/whatever and then you can always roll back?
instead of deleting messages, put them in an archive folder?
This might be even more complex than my email filter idea, but it indeed looks appropriate.
(n)mh stores messages as one message per file, so I can efficiently copy them among computers. It's not as simple as tarballs because the names are not identifiers, (They are just the order in which the mails are displayed.) but so I might do something like inspecting the message-ids. Unfortunately, this doesn't make my system any simpler.
A side note: If I am to go this route, I think it would be easier to copy the messages before they are delivered; that is, the mail delivery agent would run on my laptop rather than on the server.
I'm starting to consider whether maybe the risk of losing email is fine. If I receive the email in nmh on my laptop, the main risk is from my SSD failing between when I receive the mail and when I back up the mail. If I receive the mail on some other computer with a RAID, it's more likely that I'll temporarily lose access to the server because of maintenance. Is it really that bad to lose a day of emails every couple years? I would know if I lost them.
Silly me, I don't need to use nmh's POP feature. I'm going to configure getmail to retrieve over IMAP and move files after retrieving them; then I'll load email from the local mail drop. getmail and fastmail both have ample configurations for deleting emails after a specified time.
In fairness, once it's setup, it's a fairly decent solution.
I wound up doing almost what I said above; I'm using slocal from nmh to receive and filter the mail instead of putting it in an mbox mail drop.
I move files to the "Archive" folder after I download them, and I just leave them there because I have tons of space in my fastmail account. If I needed to, I could configure fastmail or some other service to automatically delete things from that folder after a particular number of days.
Having done it this way, I can use pretty much any modern email account. Fastmail is overkill, but it works just fine.
Since this is lowendtalk, I feel like commenting on the costs. I want high uptime, but I'm fine with having very little storage, slow connections, and no filtering. I'm on the $40/year Fastmail personal plan because that's the cheapest personal plan that lets you use your own domain name. This plan has a bunch of things I never use, such as calendar, address book, web hosting, and lots of storage. I recently figured out that you can use your own domain name with a "family" plan, so I might switch to a $15/year plan. That's still way more expensive than I think it needs to be, but it's cheap enough.
I personally don't see any useful function in synching machines so I use POP3 and delete mail on the server about once a year, or when it gets past five figures. At that point I change directory locally so I can instantly search past years. Clawsmail is good for that since it allows any directory structure you want and has a near instant search.