Email Solutions on Ubuntu Linux

Email solutions on Ubuntu Linux vary according to the control you want over the email you receive and the accessibility you want to your account. When beginning to use Ubuntu, the two main types of email systems available address these two extremes: total control or ubiquitous accessibility. But others exist, and here we take a look at the spectrum of email solutions for Ubuntu Linux.

For the following discussion, realize that email, like everything else that operates over the Internet, works on the basis of clients and servers. Servers, as the name suggests, serve something to clients. What they serve depends on the type of server, and the client is always programmed specifically for a particular type of server. So email programs (i.e., email clients) cannot access web pages because web pages are served by a web server. Similarly, a web browser cannot access email servers directly because it is not built for it.

Types of Email Clients

On Ubuntu Linux and in the world of computing in general, there are two basic kinds of email clients: desktop and web-based. These differ based on the already mentioned criteria of control and accessibility. High amounts of control mean that the server no longer has your email once you receive it on your machine. High accessibility means that the server retains control of your email, but you can access it from most any place you can access the Internet.

Desktop Clients

High control is typified by desktop clients and programs that function like them. So if your smartphone has an email program, it functions similarly to a desktop email program. That is, you put in the email settings, it downloads your messages, and you read them on the same computer as the client program is installed.

On Ubuntu, the default email client is Evolution. To configure Evolution, see our guide for desktop email configuration.

Webmail

High accessibility is found in web-based solutions for email. In this case, you log into a web-based service that then collects your email for you and presents it in a web page. In this case, the email stays on a server on the Internet, not on your computer. While you do not have control over the email and would lose your messages if the server failed, you do have access to your account from any computer or computing device that can bring up a web page.

Many email systems provide both the email account and a way of accessing it. For example, if you sign up to Gmail (Google's email service) or Yahoo Mail, you provide you email and the interface for it. This is obviously convenient, but it also has its drawbacks. For instance, with these services you:

• Cannot access accounts not run by that company
• Give up the privacy of your email for the company's data-mining
• Cannot always backup your email
• Cannot always download your email when you want to leave their service

Other services like 2easy Office provide access to all of your email accounts without providing the email account itself. The value in this is that you can access all of your email accounts from a central, web-based location. As the company does not host your email, they also don't mine your messages for data.

Types of Email Accounts

If you have ever setup an email account before, you will know that there are two basic types of email services: POP and IMAP. POP stands for Post Office Protocol. IMAP is Internet Message Access Protocol. After we unpack these further, the value in using one over the other will become apparent.

POP Email

The POP system is used whenever you want to download messages en masse to your computer. The idea is that your email account is like a post office box into which mail is delivered. When you access that box, you would normally take all the mail out of it. Consequently, the default method of message retrieval for POP is to delete the messages from the server once they have been received by the client (i.e., your computer). Setting up Evolution for POP is covered in our email configuration guide.

This creates a security problem in that you have no other email archive for your messages. To mitigate this problem without necessarily backing up your email file, simply leave the messages on the server. Most IT departments do not like users doing this because it can clog up the mail-handling systems. However, if your email quota is sufficiently large and you are diligent about deleting unnecessary messages, you can get away with leaving a copy on the server.

In leaving messages on the server, however, note that the download procedure may seem to be slower than if you downloaded all messages. This is because of the dialogue that must happen between client and server. The system is smart enough to know that you don't need to download all messages every time; therefore, it tries to synchronise between server and client. This means uploading information, which happens at a slower rate than downloads on ADSL connections. Further, if the messages arrive at disparate times, they will be at different points on the server drive, and this can slow the process down.

IMAP Email

IMAP email is the preferred alternative to leaving messages on the server with POP. It provides some of the benefits of accessibility while sacrificing the control you get with downloading all messages every time. It is also the default behavior of the 2easy Office mail client.

With IMAP, the only messages that are downloaded to your local computer are those you choose to read. Until you read the message, you normally only download the subject, sender and date information (i.e., the headers) and not the message itself. Once a message is read, a copy of it resides on your computer until you delete the message - at which time it is usually removed from both client and server. You can see how to setup a desktop client for use with IMAP in our email configuration guide to Evolution.

Securing Email

By default, email is sent across the Internet in plain text. This means that whatever you write can be seen by anyone who stops the message along the way. This is why data security standards like PCI DSS require the encryption of credit card data transmitted over open channels.

Securing Your Messages

To better understand how to secure email, you need first to understand just how email travels from the sender to the recipient. The traditional (non-VoIP) telephone call happens across a system of wires. Original phone operators would simply connect two wires, and people could talk to each other. Email, as the name implies, is more like traditional postal mail systems. You drop it off and it is handed off between carriers until it reaches its destination. Unlike traditional mail, however, email can be read without being "opened". This is because it travels, in effect, in a see-through envelope.

Your email is usually stored on the mail server in a single text file (though it can be a series of files, one per message, if the server is so configured). There is no encryption implicit in the way the mail is stored. When a message is sent, it is simply text like what you are reading now.

Mail clients and servers are designed to parse the file in order to make sense out of it. They are programmed, for example, to recognize the word "Date" and to recognize that everything on that line pertains to the data on which the message was sent. They act similarly for the "From" and "To" fields, along with scores more (depending on the setup of your email client and the configuration of servers en route). To have completely secure email, you would have to encrypt all of this, but that would render it unreadable by any public server system, who would not have the decryption information and therefore could not send it on.

Consequently, full encryption of all your communication is not feasible. Instead, securing your email messages usually boils down to practicing encryption on the message itself. This helps to ensure no one knows what you are writing but does not prevent others from knowing the recipients of your message.

Securing Your Email Sending and Receiving

Email accounts usually come with a password. However, if your email client and server are not setup for secure connections, the login information is sent across the Internet as plain text. Anyone along the way who has the know-how can then sniff your login information off the network using a passive packet sniffer like tcpdump. For this reason, services like Gmail, Yahoo, and 2easyOffice provide secured logins for your email.

By encrypting the login, Gmail and Yahoo combine everyone's traffic into streams from a small group of servers that they use for sending mail. Because their accounts are free, spammers also use these accounts. Therefore, mail from these servers are sometimes blocked as suspicious, and users have no control over this.

2easy Office acts as an intermediary to your mail account's servers. By doing so, it further obscures your email from your location, thus providing better security.

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