[thechat] Home email solution

[Paul Cowan]

Hi all,

I'm wanting to change the way I deal with my personal email, and I'm not
sure that I'm going to be ontopic for thelist, so here I am.

I have an always-on DSL connection at home; I run a Red Hat 7 box as
a DSL gateway/firewall, and for a few 'essential services' like DNS and
so on.

I want to set up a VPN from work <--> home so I can log into my home
network from work. One of my goals here is to manage my email more 
effectively.

Currently, I just use Outlook Express at work, and tell it to leave
messages on the server so I can archive them 'permanently' at home.
That's kludgy, though, and doesn't keep my sent mails in one place, blah
blah blah.

I need to be able to slurp in mail from a whole bunch of accounts 
(including 'catchall' accounts, which can be very painful to manage
WELL), store them in either distinct mailboxes or clump them together 
(depends on the account), keep track of read emails, manage message 
rules, search through mails, ideally do bayesian spam filtering, etc 
etc.

Basically, I'm looking for something with all the felixibility (don't
laugh) of Exchange Server, but without the massive overkill of running
an Exchange server at home.

Will a decent IMAP server do everything I want? If so, does anyone have
any recommendations? What about a good IMAP client which handles multiple
'identities' really well (e.g. better than the otherwise-excellent
Mozilla Mail does)? Should I be using something non-IMAP? Any other
ideas?

Sorry if I'm rambling, or asking too much, but I'm sure other geeks...
er... PEOPLE... have done this before and would have some advice.

Thanks in advance,

Paul