Joël Lopes Da Silva on the Web!

The least I can say is that I like e-mail. I like it so much that I have been accumulating so many different e-mail accounts recently, that reading my mails was becoming horrible. That's why I decided to group all my mails on a single e-mail account, and by the way, begin to use IMAP: indeed, I have been using POP (and SSH+mutt, it's true) until now.

I first thought the best solution was to use Gmail: I like Gmail web interface very much, it gives a lot of storage, allows user defined filters, and I can use it in IMAP with any IMAP client. I could even use a custom e-mail address, since Google Apps for your domain is free of charge. Well, in fact, it's complicated... 

I experienced very annoying things with Gmail IMAP, mostly when I was using Apple's Mail.app. First, the fact that Gmail uses labels, and not folders: it can be a good thing, but I personnaly prefer flagging my mail by putting them in the right directory. I understand that this weird system was needed for their folder All mail, but it brings nothing but a weird behaviour in Mail.app (if you don't use exclusively the webmail). For example, when I had a new mail, Mail.app was saying that I had two unread mails: one in the inbox, and the other in All mail. Worse, even if the one in the inbox was read, the other in All mail was still marked as unread.

When I tried user defined filters, instead of having two versions of one mail, I had in fact three versions: one in the inbox, the other one in All mail, and the last one was in the proper directory. Well, I like e-mail, but I don't like when I loose my time because of it.

Therefore, I decided to use my own mail system: I installed a complete mail solution on a Debian server (in fact the mail server where this website is hosted), with Postfix, AMaViS (with ClamAV), MySQL, SASL, Dovecot, and RoundCube. Of course, all of this is available only through "over SSL connections", thanks to a beautiful Class 3 CAcert SSL certificate. I decided to use Maildir, with virtual_mailbox, since I didn't want an unix account to be associated with the e-mail account. The MySQL database has been customized, as well as my SQL queries, in order to solve my "multiple domains owned by multiple users" issue.

The only thing I still want but couldn't implement in my server was user defined filter: I would like the MDA to organize my mails, so that they could be automatically organized, no matter what mail client I use (isn't it IMAP's philosophy?)... Indeed, when I use the webmail, or my iPod Touch, they are still to organize. I saw a few things on the web about separating automatically spam, but I want more than this; and if RoundCube could let me set those filters up, then I think it would be the best mail solution ever.