Technology

Setting up a basic email server shouldn't be too difficult. The difficult parts come with:

• Security -- your computer will have to download and store every email -- and every attachment -- that comes in, regardless of who sends it, and how will you make sure those files don't harm your computer?

• Domain name/IP address issues -- You have to have some way for other email servers to know where to send the emails addressed to you ... which means you'll need some kind of domain name. Worse, you'll need to tie that domain name to your computer somehow, even if your ISP randomly decides to change your IP address. You could fork out money to the ISP for a static IP address so that doesn't happen, but hopefully there's a better way than that.

• Uptime -- If someone attempts to send you an email while your email server is inoperative or your ISP's internet connection is down, it will get bounced back as undeliverable, and most senders won't try to re-send an email like that. Some senders will even remove your address from their mailing list if they get such an error, because that usually means that it's an incorrect/invalid email address. You can easily get pretty good uptime, but you can never count on it being perfect. And if you're depending on that email for very important communications, any outage might be a nerve-wracking problem.