sick of hearing 1 gb email space.. time to do something about it!

[SMiL3Y]

personally, I'm sick of hearing 1 gb space email or 2 gb space email. If I buy a domain name. What tools do I need to setup my own email account? I just started using freebsd and I was wondering If I can use it to create my own email account with the email space I want. If anyone has something to say, just post it.

[fyrewall]

Why are you sick of hearing about increase in email storage. That is a good thing for us the user's and the fact that we have email companies competing to deliver us the better product. Well its a win for the customer

1gb or 2gb is an awesome size for an email account. I know i wouldn't use that much space

Remember hotmail only used to offer 2mb (i think) (dunno what they do now). So 1 or 2gb is a huge change for the better

[AngelicKnight]

Hmm...well first you'd need a mail server. Beyond that, I'm pretty clueless myself. So guys, how DO you set up one of those? The whole process would likely be more expensive than it's worth though.

[cheyenne1212]

Yeah hotmail is increasing its storage space though to 250MB for free accounts

[fyrewall]

Even 250mb is a good amount. I wouldn't use that much in a hotmail account. My work email though.. I could there.

[CXGJarrod]

Basically it costs a bunch of money.

You need:

1) Internet access that supports you hosting a server (See TOS)
2) A desktop or server machine to run the site
3) An OS that will run your mailserver
4) Mailserver program (Plenty of free ones)
5) Knowledge to configure and secure your server (priceless)

[Ennis]

When are you all going to offer me a GMail account?

[djscribble]

to get back to your question --

http://www.aasimon.org/mailserver/

this webpage will tell you how you can setup a mail server in freebsd..

if you want to make it so that you can use username@mydomainname.com make sure you setup the mx records correctly with some type of free domain name service

[gothic_type]

If you already have internet access and a spare computer lying around, it won't really cost you any more money to set up a mail server. But it's difficult to say how well that server would perform, and (as CXGJarrod said) whether or not you would be able to secure it enough to be able to send and receive mail without other people being able to "abuse" your server.

Most *nix systems either come with some sort of mail server installed, or if not it is easy enough to add one, but you have to ask yourself: would you really have to patience to make sure it was kept up to date, the rest of your system was also patched to the latest versions, and would you check the logs to see if people had been attempting to break your box?

If you couldn't/wouldn't do the above, it's doubtful that you should be running a mail server unless you really don't care about people getting access to your email.

Basically, if you already had the above skills, you wouldn't have asked. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't run a mail server, but just be sure that if you do, you know that the computer you run the server on could get totally wrecked (in general, running servers makes your computer easier to attack), your email could be viewed, your server could be used to send malicious emails or spam/email bomb people, and that if you run a network and your server box is connected to it, the other computers on the network could also be damaged.

NOTE: although I mentioned using *nix boxes for the mail server, many other OS's can run mail servers (including windows).

Hope that helps,

ac

[SMiL3Y]

hey, thank you for the information and opinions.