I deal with email on a daily basis, both at home and at work. My work email volume is a lot larger than my home email, but I wanted to touch on both a bit.

Home
Home email consists of two main addresses. One here at this domain and my Gmail address. Previously I had used Thunderbird to deal with my email, but after losing my mail files for what seemed to be the hundredth time, I decided to move to just going with IMAP / online only access. This was also driven home by the iPhone, since that seems to be what I use to first check my email. I recently set Gmail to poll my domain email into Gmail itself and tag it, so I only have one place to go for my mail. Yes, I realize that Google is potentially ‘evil’, but so far they haven’t proven themselves to me to be evil. Gmail works, I love the interface and it’s nice having all of my email going to one place. Additionally, it’s one less account to log into.

Work
My work email is a different beast. I have one email address, however, there is a ton of email generated daily by the ticket system, customers and coworkers. I’m currently downloading mail via POP3 and using Mutt to read it, since I need easy access to the mail if I’m ever logged into my machine remotely. However, the problem of searching said mail and trying to keep it archived is beginning to surface. I’ve got about 2 years of email in mbox format right now, which I rsync off of my box to another server for backup purposes. Searching these emails is a long, drawn out process, and I’m beginning to search for an alternative solution as far as email goes. I could convert to using IMAP and going that route, which would then give me a web-based interface from remote locations. This is what I’m looking at, however, I need to find a solution to searching the existing mail archives. I could attempt to roll my own solution, I could just use grep, or I could search around and see if I can find something else out there. I may end up posting something to a mailing list somewhere to see if anyone else has come across this problem.