I have 15 minutes a month to run my own shit. What solution do you have?
No, really. I would rather spend that five hours making sure shit works with my boyfriend, or my family, or my friends, or learning something that will make me money, or working on a pretty cool hack I thought of while in the museum last week, or working on my unfinished novel that has been languishing, or work on proofreading a paper for a friend, or just relax.
Yeah, system administration is under those priorities.
I am more than willing to pay. I just want to pay one person for everything. I want that integration. I want webmail. I want to be able to access it from my phone without issue. I like integration.
I may be a geek, but I have better things to do than figure out why my email isn't getting to a friend because someone's IP address ended up on spamhaus.
Ebiester: if you want a decent email platform with webmail, calendaring and maybe xmpp, have a look at Zimbra.
It's super easy to install, all you need is a VPS with Centos 6 or Ubuntu 12.04 and a static IP address, then download and execute the installer.
I understand it's not so easy to run your own stuff, but it's also not as hard as some people believe, especially if all your need is a small setup for personal use.
I'll try to wrap up some tutorials in the near future to help people run stuff on their own. I'll remember to ping you when done.
I think you missed something critical in ebeister's comment. It wasn't "how can I do it?" It was "how can I do it within this severely limiting constraint?"
You might argue that a few hours a month isn't much time for working email, but it is when Google will reduce it to 0 for you. In a hierarchy of needs, food is far more important than email, and despite this very few of us try to completely manage our own farm.
Getting an email server up and running is trivial, just like planting a few crops in the garden is. It's the reliability and maintenance that is the hard part.
> I am more than willing to pay. I just want to pay one person for everything. I want that integration. I want webmail. I want to be able to access it from my phone without issue.
I'm in the same boat - currently looking for somewhere to move stuff to. I'm giving atmail.com serious consideration for mail/calendar/contacts, as the first is reasonably easy and the latter two _seem_ to be working on desktop, android, and ipad. They don't do XMPP though, so I need to figure out a solution for that.
I would still recommend Zimbra or Zarafa, as far as open source goes. Or if you can't be bothered with running your own, both products list a series of partners who do this for you.
Again: people, run your own shit. Stop playing the google roulette.