In reply to a post by jaba:

The elephant in the room is how to sync sent emails on all clients. I have been trying to achieve this on and off for several years on an automated basis without too much luck for there is no elegant solution.
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EDIT : Ahh I see the OP has now found a solution which is ok for him so I will now leave the thread in peace.

Thanks anyway, as it looked like some useful suggestions coming up. However, as you say, I think I have it sorted now.

Judging from the conversations between XRaySpeX, john2007 and BatBoy I seem to have been fortunate in my choice of Host, on this ground as well as the ones I chose them on. It is in fact almost the elegant solution I was looking for, the minor drawback being I may have to archive occasionally to stay within my file space, or alternatively dump my 3 2-domain packages at £15pa each into a single 6-domain one at £50pa, and get 20 times the storage. Problem eliminated as I'll die before accumulating that much stuff.

Phew - original POP3 Thunderbird account completely reconstructed , including the filter rules, and overlap with the 30-days or so removed from the IMAP side, so with luck my jobs next week are to:

- clear out garbage;
- drag the unsorted IMAP emails into the POP3 Inbox;
- drag the POP3 folders and sub-folders back to the IMAP account;
- via webmail set up the filter rules on the server;
- check it all worked;
- delete the POP3 accounts and set up dummy IMAP equivalents purely to provide outgoing email addresses, meaning the ones we send from ... now there's a thought, I have 10 mailboxes per package, so maybe drive things that way instead;
- repeat for all domains, except bring everything down by POP3 before setting up the IMAP.

I do what you want, but not with Windows. I have a small Linux box running fetchmail (to fetch mail from external sources), exim4 (to send/move mail), dovecot (to provide IMAP access to the mail) and squirrelmail (to read/compose mail). This box is on the same switch as my router.

I don't leave e-mail on external servers for very long.

Sounds fine John but probably a higher level solution than I need. Especially as I don't really want to set up Linux to do it. IIRC you are running a business, and at the moment all I have is a few hundred per month with probably over half that now spam, where I shall be setting up blacklists on the servers.

Those aren't really going to work well though as the blighters are using sensible addresses before the @. Looks like it's time to accept specific addresses instead of a catchall on everything - pain . Funny, it's only the last year that my personal domain has started getting them, though I think I remember suspecting a nephew had had his contacts lifted. Which he denied any knowledge of. RobertoS is of course the sitting duck, and that has to be a catchall.

How automated is all your setup anyway? The worst I have to do is shift a pile of stuff on a date basis probably once a year, probably less than an hour's work.

But anything I haven't thought of about leaving up to 2 years on the server, (then archiving a year), other than worrying about losing it? I do have the network disc doing a daily incremental backup anyway so that is covered.

I suppose the occasional email one gets from online shopping where they give the username and password may be better deleted, but that depends on how likely server hacking is, and how important that particulatr account is. Sod's law says if that happens it will be at the worst possible time anyway.

I originally set the POP3 retention to 30 days just in case of catastrophe here, and for convenience of webmail access when away. IMAP for that will be much easier.

What I do is a straightforward solution for a Linux box as I don't do anything fancy.

I manually archive mail every 6 months are so but I leave it on the local server. It's backed up on daily basis to two other machines.