Sheridan,
I know it's been silent since we last talked about situating a community mail server in Arcspace, but we have had much discussion about it at our end.
We've looked into different types of hardware, and are still investigating things like the maximum level of privacy that we could offer users. It looks like a single plug computer (FreedomBox) would not be sufficient to perform as both a mail server and also a web server (for a webmail client to the mail server). We could use multiple FBs (though we couldn't cluster them it seems), or we could use alternative hardware, like a Fit PC 3 (much more system resources and still only 9 watts, see http://s.coop/7r85), but either of those options would require several hundred pounds investment to purchase and ship new machines (especially as prices of HDDs recently more than doubled).
During our last Fellowship meeting we wondered whether Arcspace has a spare machine that we could use for the initial server. Investing money in new low power hardware would make more sense once we already have some users signed up and therefore some income for the project guaranteed. We could then migrate from one server to another (I have experience with this, and both machines would presumably have the same architecture and use the same OS).
Do you have a machine available that we could use? Would you / Arcspace be happy for us to use it as an Arcspace server for as long as it took to get our initial group of users / members? I realise that using an old machine like this has cost implications for you as it would draw more power. However, as a headless server I see no reason why it would require more than about 250-300 watts maximum. Ideally it would be a dual core machine with 1 or 2gb RAM, but obviously it depends on what you have available.
Thanks,
Sam.