Hardy har har... Your email has not been hacked. What's more than likely going on is someone is spoofing your email header. check out emkei's fake mailer or emkei.cz on google, you can send emails to yourself with your own address as a return address. unless you look at the full headers you'd have no idea at all. sometimes even looking from those I have seen them spoofed as well. It can be really annoying, my gmail gets about 1k spam a week 25% of which is reply-to me.
My basic setup, which runs on a machine sitting in the corner of the room at home, is Postfix with amavis-new/spamassassin/clamav, with a handful of things like DNSBL checks. There are pages on the http://help.ubuntu.com website which should help get you started.
In order to unblock port 25 (not 100% essential, but it can make some things easier), I had to get a static IP address, which wasn't immediately obvious from the ISP's help pages when I organized it, and also costs a little bit extra on the phone bill.
Initally I used a free domain name from no-ip.com but then moved to one from dyn.com. Setting these up is fairly straightforward. Some routers have options which take care of updating DNS records if your IP address changes.
As my needs have evolved, I've added a handful of bits and pieces based on tips and tricks found on various websites, and a few months back added a custom written set of filters (done in PHP, not particularly well suited to the task, but functional).
Last edited by lisati; March 1st, 2013 at 12:15 AM. Reason: Fix typo
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I'm a happy Fastmail (fastmail.fm) user. It's worth paying for.
I used Fastmail several years ago, then switched to Gmail for several more years. Eventually, though, I began to be annoyed by its slow servers and its non-standard IMAP implementation.
A few months ago I moved back to Fastmail and have been very satisifed. I see no discernible delay in loading mail, while in Gmail displaying each individual mail would take at least a few seconds, often more.
I use Fastmail via Thunderbird. When you set up any mail client to use an IMAP server, it's important to map the client's folders to the IMAP folder. E.g., you probably want mail you send to be deposited in your IMAP server's sent mail folder. Ditto trash, drafts, junk/spam, etc. In Thunderbird, you do this via Settings->Copies&Folders.
Fastmail web site is clear and easy to use, if you don't want to use a client.
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