Background and Motivations

I had been a paying Google Apps customer for personal and corporate use since the service was in beta. Until several weeks ago, that is. I was about to set up another Google Apps account for a new project when I stopped to consider what I would be funding with my USD $50 per user per year:

1. A seriously questionable privacy track record.
2. A dwindling commitment to open standards.
3. A lack of long-term commitment to products.
4. Development of Google+: a cynical and unimaginative Facebook ripoff that’s intruding into progressively more Google products.

To each her/his own, but personally I saw little reason to continue participating in the Google ecosystem. It had been years since I last ran my own server for email and such, but it’s only gotten cheaper and easier to do so. Plus, none of the commercial alternatives I looked at provided all the services I was looking for.

Rather than writing up a long and hard-to-follow set of instructions, I decided to share my server setup in a format that you can more or less just clone, configure, and run. Ansible seemed like the most appropriate way to do that: it’s simple, straightforward, and easy to pick up.

I’ve been using this setup for about a month now and it’s been great. It’s also replaced some non-Google services I used, saving me money and making me feel like I’ve got a little more privacy.

A big chunk of the initial version was inspired by this post by Drew Crawford. Unlike Drew, my goal is not “NSA-proofing” email, just providing a reasonable alternative to Google Apps that isn’t wildly insecure. If you need serious privacy and security (ex: for dissident activities), Sovereign might be useful as a starting point but will require additional work. Be careful out there.