Our biggest mailbox is 200mb. Pretty much everything gets deleted or moved out of the mail system. It's not a file system. If you think it is, you're doing it wrong.
Backups: tar and gzip daily, then scp to a friend's server in another country. Also take manual backups to encrypted USB stick weekly which I carry around on me at all times.
Searching: you only have to search it if you have lots of it. I have 9 messages in my maildir. I receive perhaps 20-30 messages a day. No problems - they all fit on the screen. If it's worth keeping, it goes as a ticket/wiki entry or in the hg repo as a document.
Spam: get one or two a week per user. Just delete by hand at the moment. People who use imap use their mail client's spam filtering stuff. If it gets problematic I'll probably install a filter.
Calendars/contacts: both in mercurial in agenda format (plain text, one line per event or contact). Very easy to manage and share. Have you tried keeping a central address book/calendar accurate using any other method?
I know how much we'll lose without email which is why it is where it is :) About 2m from me most of the time.
Cost? I've spent 20 minutes on admin this year. Everything is automated..
I'm not skimping, I'm making sure we do it right so we don't need all the tooling and features. To be honest, google is too cheap to be good if you ask me and their reputation shows regulalrly with outages and problems.
Backups: tar and gzip daily, then scp to a friend's server in another country. Also take manual backups to encrypted USB stick weekly which I carry around on me at all times.
Searching: you only have to search it if you have lots of it. I have 9 messages in my maildir. I receive perhaps 20-30 messages a day. No problems - they all fit on the screen. If it's worth keeping, it goes as a ticket/wiki entry or in the hg repo as a document.
Spam: get one or two a week per user. Just delete by hand at the moment. People who use imap use their mail client's spam filtering stuff. If it gets problematic I'll probably install a filter.
Calendars/contacts: both in mercurial in agenda format (plain text, one line per event or contact). Very easy to manage and share. Have you tried keeping a central address book/calendar accurate using any other method?
I know how much we'll lose without email which is why it is where it is :) About 2m from me most of the time.
Cost? I've spent 20 minutes on admin this year. Everything is automated..
I'm not skimping, I'm making sure we do it right so we don't need all the tooling and features. To be honest, google is too cheap to be good if you ask me and their reputation shows regulalrly with outages and problems.