Personal Mail Server

Silver Bullet

How many of you run your own personal mail server?

I am considering doing this. I have setup several Mail Servers for production and test purposes but never for personal use. But here recently my wife's employer (Bank) has started requiring them to receive their bank statements via email rather than the traditional paper statement via snail mail. Now my concern with this is that the main email address we use together is through our ISP (POP3). The problem with this is they do not offer encrypted authentication for mail retrieval and well.....it kinda bothers me to use their service for this sensitive of information knowing that my username/password is being sent across the wire in clear text. I do have a gmail account and I know that they support encrypted authentication but again, I don't feel comfortable using their service for this sensitive of information.

So there is my reasoning behind considering this. I am just trying to decide if I am going overboard here.

So, do you?

Opinions?

Smallguy

I think electronic statement are pretty standard now... personally I view my online and never receive paper.... my bank offers this option.

I don't get statements emailed to me


one thing to keep in mind is many ISP's do not allow you to setup your own mail server any more unless you purchase a business connection

JDMurray

Does you bank recommend a secure email service? If they require their customers to have one it seems that they would have a few recommendations. There are a lot of secure email services available. I keep hearing about HushMail in the tech podcasts. S-MAIL and CryptoMail.org come up a lot in Google searches too.

I just login to my bank's Web site to read my statements, so except for simple notifications no email is necessary.

networker050184

I just login to my bank's Web site to read my statements, so except for simple notifications no email is necessary.

Same way I do my banking. Just tell your bank you do not want statements via email. They usually send out an email saying the new statements are available on-line.

Silver Bullet

Wow, I really thought there would be more that did this.

Smallguy wrote:

one thing to keep in mind is many ISP's do not allow you to setup your own mail server any more unless you purchase a business connection

Yeah, I have spoken to them about it. They block port 25 for their residential customers but said that if I wanted to then just use them as a relay. In all actuality, there SMTP server is going to see the same amount of e-mail from me whether I use their email server or mine. So, unless someone is blasting spam, then I don't see why they would mind. Especially when they themselves don't offer a secure solution.

JDMurray wrote:

Does you bank recommend a secure email service? If they require their customers to have one it seems that they would have a few recommendations.

One would certainly think they would but unfortunately they do not. Especially given that most all of their customers are not aware of how email retrieval occurs and that their authentication is sent in clear text. [sarcasm]"but it has all of these ****** when I typed it in"[/sarcasm]

JDMurray wrote:

I just login to my bank's Web site to read my statements, so except for simple notifications no email is necessary.

I do this as well and really never opened the statements that came via snail mail. Ultimately, telling them not to send the statement, but rather the notification, would be the simplest solution.

This bank is not forcing their customers to do this.....just it's employees.

I really thought that there would be more out there that ran their own mail server. I'm kinda shocked.

networker050184

I really thought that there would be more out there that ran their own mail server. I'm kinda shocked.

With the abundance of free email services out there I don't think many people really have a reason to. I'm sure there is someone here running their own though. It would be a good project to work on.