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I don't understand why anyone would run their own email server. Cloud offerings work so well and are cheap.

• Taek 10y ago
  If you are using the cloud for email they can usually see all of your activity. Email is also how you typically reset passwords. It can expose corporate secrets. In practice, nobody encrypts their email. And even if they do, the cloud still gets all the metadata. Running your own trades the above issues for other issues, but depending on your priorities and fears it might be worth doing.
  • raarts 10y ago
    > in practice nobody encrypts their email. I work in the defence industry. All attachments must be encrypted. Also, all customer data must be stored in the same country.
• thinknot 10y ago
  So your email is in your home?
• jacquesm 10y ago
  Maybe they are under contract not to pass information to third parties or maybe the company policy is to not let internal email off the network. That you don't understand it is likely from the perspective of an individual, possibly a private user. For those applications you can't beat the cloud. For business use every business needs to weigh their own needs. Even then though, many business think they need to have their own server when they really don't and vice-versa.
  • muro 10y ago
    Sure, but those are rare and usually include enough budget to include sysadmins and definitely enough to buy ECC memory. For anyone weighing whether ECC is worth it, they are wasting time managing their email server.
    • jacquesm 10y ago
      Those are not rare at all. Every lawyers office has this problem, every journalist, every banker, every insurance company, every notary public, every administration and so on.
      • pvg 10y ago
        Most of these are not contractually obliged to run their own email servers so whatever problem they have, it's not that specific one.
        • jacquesm 10y ago
          No, but they are contractually required to keep their customers (and their own) data confidential. And that can lead to them deciding to run their own mailservers as well as other infrastructure. Whether that's a good decision or not is another matter, that mostly depends on execution.
          • pvg 10y ago
            Right, what I mean is that your average legal practice, notary public, journalist doesn't actually have this problem like you said. Cloud services cover them just fine. Somewhat unrelated, your comment gave me the idea to look up the MX records of the last few law firms I've interacted with: mostly cloud, as expected. The biggest and fanciest likely probably has their own servers. Their terminating MX is some middling cheapo hosting company. Disturbing.
            • jacquesm 10y ago
              Yes, I would agree that for most companies that are in this position rolling your own could easily end up being more problematic than going with gmail or office365. That doesn't mean it does not happen and when it happens they are usually sitting ducks. The chances of your average law office having an IT staff with capabilities comparable to Google are nil. At the same time the legacy of Snowden has caused a lot of companies to wonder if they're wise to put anything off-premises. And then there's dropbox, weshare and a million other 'handy' services that could easily hoover up and analyze everything that passes through (or whoever hacked them).
• amenod 10y ago
  NSA agrees with you, for one.
  • throwa38282 10y ago
    NSA is not the primary threat here. More conventional legal mechanisms are. Home serving is just as vulnerable to the NSA.
    • thraway2016 10y ago
      Conventional legal mechanisms against your home server cabinet can be handled via full disk encryption and a reed switch on your cabinet door connected to your power strip.
      • tscs37 10y ago
        Sounds fun until you have to open your cabinet door for legit reasons like swapping a faulty hard drive in your RAID array.
        • lmm 10y ago
          Huh? If you're going to swap a faulty hard drive you want to power off anyway.
          • tscs37 10y ago
            I hotswap drives all the time, it's not a problem and makes a harddrive swap a 30 second task instead of a 10 minute task and doesn't incur downtime either.
            • lmm 10y ago
              Most consumer hard drives (and indeed bays) are not designed for hotswapping and it can cause damage (though maybe modern build quality is good enough that you'd be lucky most of the time). "Downtime" on your home server in your closet is a minor inconvenience at worst.
• rocky1138 10y ago
  > cheap Hard to beat free. Couple this with the fact that I learn something by setting it up makes this a win for me.
• brongondwana 10y ago
  Cloud offering here: we run ECC memory on all our servers, natch. It's not turtles quite all the way down.