I have been using Gmail for a while now, and really think that it's about the best email provider out there. I recently moved my mail over from Google Apps to my own server, but I wanted the major features that I liked. I've always used a desktop mail client and used POP3 and SMTP to receive and send mail.

These are the features I particularly like:

1. Secure access with TLS/SSL
2. Outgoing SMTP with authentication
3. Messages sent via SMTP are automatically stored in the mailbox
4. Messages downloaded via POP3 are still stored on the server
5. IMAP and Web access

I therefore set out to recreate this setup as closely as possible. The first two are satisfied by a standard Postfix setup with TLS and SMTP AUTH. The last one is done with Dovecot and Roundcube.

To automatically store sent messages on the server, I used Postfix's sender_bcc_maps to BCC messages I send to myself, and the following Procmail recipe to move these messages to the Sent folder.

:0
* ^Return-Path.*me@example.com
.Sent/

To make POP3 access independent from IMAP, I first configured Dovecot to use a different mail location for each as follows.

protocol imap {
    mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir
}
protocol pop3 {
    mail_location = /var/mail/%u
}

I then used the following Procmail recipe to send incoming messages to both locations.

DEFAULT=$HOME/Maildir/
:0c:
/var/mail/mgorven

At the moment this is only setup for my user, but it should be possible to do it for all users by creating a global procmailrc and telling Postfix to deliver all mail using Procmail. This is working fairly well. The only part missing is that Gmail can archive or mark messages as read when they are downloaded via POP3, whereas in my setup POP3 and IMAP are completely independent.