Central Email Storage

I’ve been looking for a good email storage solution for many years now.
I’ve been wrestling with the problem that anybody who owns and uses
multiple computers has probably encountered at one time or another. How
do you keep your email synced between multiple computers? Nothing is
worse than needing to reference an email while working on your laptop,
and realizing that the email in question is on your desktop.

I’ve been looking for solution that would do the following for me:

  • Make copies of my email available to all of my computers.
  • Makes it easy to backup my mail.

Until now, I’ve been running my own local IMAP server. This works fairly
well when I am on my local network, but is useless when I am somewhere
else. Not to mention, the care and feeding on an IMAP server for one
person is more trouble that it’s worth. Luckily, I found the following
post from Jeremy Zawodny. Using a variation on his setup, I now have
my email available on all my computers, I have backups, and I even have
it available via webmail.

For anyone who cares, this is how my setup works. My primary email
address is actually a forwarding alias. I’ve changed the alias to point
to my GMail account. From there, GMail forwards a copy of every
message to my ISP mailbox. Then, I download my mail via POP to my local
machine.

So far, this setup is great. I can read and manage my email with
KMail, and I have running backups and webmail access through GMail.
In a word, awesome.

Tags: Internet Email