sf-imap-server extension provides complete IMAP server combined with fetchmail.
What is the problem with existing email solutions?
Imagine that you have multiple email accounts - some free on Gmail.com, some other on Yahoo.com, some commercial ones etc. Say 17 accounts overall. And imagine that you want to use them simultaneously. Now you have 3 options:
- log in separately to 17 webmails (hard even to imagine)
- add these 17 accounts to some email client, like Thunderbird, Outlook etc. (great, but all accounts have to support IMAP protocol, and adding another email client on another computer can be obnoxious, especially when you already forgot passwords and have them stored only in an existing client)
- choose one "master" account, that is able to fetch emails from remote accounts (eg. Gmail.com), then add 16 remote accounts to it and use only this account, either via webmail or desktop/mobile email client (does it solve all your problems? what if you lose exactly this "master" account?)
Now imagine that you have eg. 2432 email accounts instead of 17. Does any of the above solutions still solve your problem?
Then optionally imagine that you are a part of group of people with the similar problem (mostly a company), where each of you have a bunch of email accounts.
What is the solution provided by sf-imap-server extension?
It installs Courier IMAP server and fetchmail tool on your Debian/Ubuntu server.
Then it allows creating internal IMAP accounts - such account is the only one that you have to connect to your email client. For each IMAP account you need to define a set of delivery rules, from which each rule causes fetchmail to fetch new messages from external account and deliver it to your internal account.
This way, you have your own "master" account on your own server, which cannot be banned by some email provider, law enforcement authority etc., and cannot be lost after eg. quitting your job. Of course you can still lose such address, but only the address: you'll still have all your previously received messages in place, and you don't need to worry about "slave" accounts plugged to your lost "master" account.
Why 3 different servers?
sf-imap-server follows Server Farmer philosophy: there is a customer (which is the end user), and there is an IT support company. The latter runs the central management server, which is a central database of individual accounts and their UIDs, and central storage server, which is responsible for backups, while customer runs the production server.
Commercial support
This extension contains the full source code of the whole solution. However if you're just looking for the working service, we can provide ready-to-use physical or virtual machines with 24/7 email/phone support: