On Mar 18, 2005, at 4:55 pm, Michael Gmail wrote: > > I've been avoiding Entourage because I don't want all my mail in a > proprietary database. But Entourage speaks IMAP, doesn't it? Is there > any reason I couldn't set up a local IMAP server on my own machine, > then store all my mail there and access it from any IMAP mail client I > feel like using? No reason at all. It would probably work very well. > How difficult is it? On Linux I did it in my spare time over the course of a few days. Installation is pretty-well documented for Linux but for Mac OS X you can use Fink or Darwin ports. This article <http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/Workbench/eart.index.html> tells you how to compile from source, but I prefer Courier to UW. Courier uses fairly standard Maildirs containing a single file per email - I _think_ UW normally uses mbox (?) format which, although standard, is a single text file per folder. > Am I overlooking anything? What I found complicated was wrapping my head around the other mail transport layers. You don't need to worry about SMTP / Postfix / sendmail, because Entourage / Mail.app on your Mac can talk directly to your ISP's mailserver. but when you've finished installing your IMAP server you'll want some way of getting mail from the mailboxes you have with your ISP to your IMAP inbox. I use fetchmail for this - it can be told to call maildrop for message-filtering. You'll probably find yourself reading a few manpages. > Can existing mail be imported? Yes. Add a new account for the server in Entourage & then drag & drop from your local servers onto the server. Stroller.