Does running your own mail server make you an email addict or does being an email addict lead to running your own mail server?

After careful consideration I believe I fall into the former. Note I’ve stopped hyphenating the word e-mail (for the most part). I seem to be proud of the fact that I’m running a mailserver and I can tell you the version numbers of the software that runs it. I’d really love to geek out here and describe the setup but I feel that doing so may push me farther out into the realm of inaccessibility. Suffice it to say that my email server scans incoming email for viruses, spam, and bad headers and deals with it accordingly, all without any client software on the user’s part, and a cavalcade of programs performs a carefully choreographed dance to make the experience as seamless as possible. Lately I’m working on reducing my spam. I’ve implemented a quarantine system where high-scoring spam gets silently copied to a database for review at the user’s discretion. Virus-infected emails are quarantined as well. I host three email domains on a single machine and am willing to host more if necessary: the setup is quick and painless.

It’s also fun to run your own mailserver because you can use whatever name strikes your fancy and change just as often. Unlike other free mail services such as Yahoo or Hotmail (where once you choose your username you’re stuck with it forever), I can just as easily become satanincarnate @ mydomain as I can lordandruleroftheuniverse @ mydomain. Of course, both of those names are unusably long…. 🙂