So, that's why you might want to rebuild all those Tools you're used to in a trusted environment - your own server. You don't want your mail stored in some possible hostile environment on a untrusted machine that could leak your valuable data. Turns out its not that easy sometimes. I've only worked on getting a capable Web Mailer and Feed Reader to run smoothly. What surprised me here - and why I'm writing about this - is that it was exceptionally hard - or rather time-intensive - for something sounding as easy as this.

I first targeted the Reader, looked around Freshmeat and SourceForge where you expect to find decent free software for that task. I've found quite a few not-so-simple-looking projects, including Tiny Tiny RSS. Turned out TinyTiny RSS is almost there, but needs PostgreSQL. So  i set up PostgreSQL, installed TTRSS and set it up. Imported GoogleReaders OPML, and zup. worked. Problem's all the feeds are in one big Table - resulting in the whole thing beeing painfully slow. So up for 7-8 Hours of harcore Postgres performance tuning, trying to hack memcached into ttrss, etc. Speedup of almost 100%, yet it was not close to beeing usable. Turns out the developer didn't intent the project for archiving articles for having a searchable archive. So up for something different, Gregarius, which the TTRSS dev recommended. This worked quite out of the box, except for 3-4 Hours of tinkering and writing small plugins to get the whole thing to work properly. But it does - and has almost all the feature one expects.

The harder part came now, Webmail. I first tried to hack the roughly-set-up RoundCube that still was on my server. After short testing and many functions that just did not work due to unknown reasons i knew i needed something different - and started toying around with Horde and its webmailer Imp(4) in the Horde Webmail Edition pack. Horde feels somehow "unix style"-ish, like ... building a highly reusable backend, letting other projects include/work ontop of that backend, etc. - but let me say one thing: This beast is so darn hard to set up. I've got it working - more or less - after hours and hours of doc reading, tinkering around with mysql tables and databases and reading Horde source due to its ... slightly lacking ... documentation on some points. Still, it was so unstable and lacked features too. So i finally decided Horde/IMP was a bit too much to go with. After searching around its a lets-get-back-to-Roundcube.

Just that this didn't make things better, well... a bit at least. It takes tinkering, fixing old plugins to work with the current version, finding out why the hell buttons are greyed out that shouldn't be and getting a "well, reset the database (again)" from the developers. All of that fun. As of now i at least managed to get everything except for Filter-Rules and sa-learning ham to work. Phew!

Okay, so why am i writing all this? you may ask yourself. Well, i've gone through some PITA for beeing independent. It really takes some work to get everything to run smoothly if you're used to professional systems that are customly coded (such as the google stuff) and backed by real money its still some hackish tinkering to get the Free Software tools that we're given by the community (which i'm not ranting against by the way, all that code out there is really beautiful in fact) to the same level. I also want to encourage everyone out there not to give away their data but to build something on their own, keeping their data. As computer users used to for a good reason for a long long time.

Z-Push is a collection of PHP Scripts that emulate a Microsoft Exchange AS Server to provide push. It supports multiple backends - IMAP among them.

One drawback of Z-Push is that it does so strange PHP magic it doesn't support PHP-CGI on apache, it wants mod_php really really bad. But mod_php is bad for security. So for testing purposes i've set up Z-Push on my homeserver instead of my dedicated server which runs php-cgi. Problem: Z-Push will run on a different domain and machine than the mailserver runs on. This produces quite some headache - here's how you solve it:

1. normally install Z-Push (simply unpack the tarball and install according to INSTALL) on your "small server". Edit config.php to reflect your timezone settings, change the BACKEND_PROVIDER to "BackendIMAP", enter your server data (you may want /ssl/[no]validate-cert in IMAP_OPTIONS). Also set IMAP_DEFAULTFROM to "@yourdomain.com" - important .
2. Configure your "small servers" MTA to relay via your "big server". As i don't want a pseudo-open relay on my "big server" i chose to use exims SMARTHOST with SMTP Login method:
3. (I'm assuming Debian here) install exim4 or start dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config. Configure your box to be a smarthost with remote smtp. Then open up "/etc/exim4/passwd.client" and add a line with the syntax "host:user:password" to reflect your "big servers" smtp account.
4. As this is a normal smtp connection and no relay, no changes must be made to your big server.
5. Thats it, enter the data as Microsoft Exchange Account on your iPhone, valdidation will fail. Press Next and Save anyways, navigate to Account Details, turn of SSL.
6. Now your Push-Email account works!

Tipp: if you need debug output from Z-Push create a file called debug.txt in its Install-Dir and chmod it a+rw.

Well, this is IMO a quite nice way to get PushMail as a SMS-Substitute for the iPhone (given all your friends have Smartphones with Internet and use your Push solution too ). Have fun!

So, after a *ton* of googeling and looking around i found out theres a app for jailbroken iPhones which reads the .sqlitedb files of Contacts, Calendar and Notes and sends it to a specialized synchronization server for PIM. Luckily theres a bunch of clients for other platforms - including S60, evolution, ldap, etc. - we're interested in the Evolution one.

So, i installed Funambol (the syncserver) on my server and started it up. First to notice is that the startup often does not work at first try - i had to start/stop the server a few times before it would serve me on http://hostname:8080/funambol/. Also there seems to be a fucked-up state where the http-server is running but the admin-interface won't let you log in. At that point i also had to restart the server a few times *sigh*.
Then i installed iPhoneSync, the iPhone funambol client on my handset, started it up, entered my servers data and synced. Woosh, failed. The Log said "server returned error -1" ... wowziez, cool - whats that? No table of error codes, no description, no server debug log entries, nothing - not even a bugreport in some mailinglist. Basically its a funambol bug concerning contact-Thumbnails with more than 8k size *Sigh*. At least its fixed in svn trunk...

Now comes the fun part - compiling Funambol. As Funambol needs tomcat, netbeans, maven2 and a whole other bunch of dependencies its *really* fun. With some tinkering i made it to a installer package - that now even works with the iPhone.
So, for all of you out there running into the same bug as me - heres a Funambol binary of svn trunk with this bug fixed:

http://tmp.kanojo.de/funambol-8.2.2-SNAPSHOT.bin

So - here's what you basically need to do:

1. scp the above binary on your server, ssh there and execute "sh funambol-8.2.2-SNAPSHOT.bin"
2. install the server as guided by the installation program, i installed it to /opt. Also note it *really* only installs stuff there, so no worries about trash not managed by the package management on your system .
3. when asked whether you want to start the server say no
4. cd to /<wherever>/Funambol/, execute "./bin/funambol-server start", wait a few minutes (you can also check top whether java has stopped eating up your whole cpu-power)
5. start up the admin interface, either on the server by using remote X (ssh -X) "./admin/bin/funamboladmin" or in a installation of funambol on your current desktop box.
6. there, log in using "admin" as user and "sa" as password, go to user management, change the admin pw (important! ) and log in again.
7. once again in user management create a new user for you.
8. on your jailbroken iPhone with cydia, install "iphonesync" via cydia, start it up, enter your servers data (http://yourhostname:8080/funambol/ds) - and sync!
9. on your desktop box, install syncevolution, to configure do the following:
10. execute "syncevolution --configure --sync-property "username=123456" --sync-property "password=!@#ABcd1234" funambol". then open up ~/.config/syncevolution/funambol/config.ini and change the URI to the same as you used on your iPhone
11. sync using syncevolution -s <mode> funambol (<mode> can be one of the items seen in "syncevolution -s ?")

Happy Syncing!