zlacker

Warren Toomey: "my mail is stored locally, not on someone else's server"

What does this mean exactly? Is his machine a mail server?

I used to know an engineer/scientists who only used a single laptop (linux) and it acted as his mail server. When he travelled he used dyndns (or some such thing) so that delayed mail would be delivered to his laptop. Could never get a straight answer about whether this worked all the time or not (whether he ended up missing emails).

>>plg+(OP)
Some mail protocols (and clients if you want to) delete the mail on the server when downloaded to the client.

>>maaaat+h
ah like POP?

but presumably the server could unbeknownst to the user, still keep copies of all incoming emails right?

>>plg+(OP)
Perhaps it was more 'my mail is stored locally once I download it'?

I use Thunderbird with pop3 settings that ask remote mail server to delete messages once downloaded. Then authenticated SMTP account to send.

No big reason, just what I do.

Edit: I believe that my shell-account provider is deleting those messages once downloaded, and not copying them somewhere else, but I have no guarantee of that as pointed out lower in the tree from the parent post.

If the gentleman is using a mail server on his PC that would be interesting as you say.

>>plg+s
So could any transit server.

>>plg+(OP)
Maybe he's using POP3 instead of IMAP? (ie downloading all the email to a local archive) Thunderbird and other clients still support that, and you can still search & tag messages within your local email archives.

It also means if your email server is hacked, they won't get your entire email history - unless your local machine gets hacked, of course.

>>plg+(OP)
For all we know, he could own a dedicated always-on machine that works as his mail server.

>>plg+(OP)
When the destination server cannot be reached usually the origin server will try again for a number of hours before giving up (and in the meanwhile it may send one or more annoying messages to the sender). I wouldn't do that though. I think that it is better to have a "regular" server (gmail etc.) handle it and have your server fetch the mail from it, without any risk of losing emails. I have a setup with fetchmail+postfix+dovecot that works very nicely.

>>plg+(OP)
Brian Kernighan uses Pine and stores his mail locally.

https://usesthis.com/interviews/brian.kernighan/

The screenshots are of Rob Pike's Sam editor.

http://sam.cat-v.org/