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I think that low-power computers are the future of "always on". I'm migrating the "always on" home computers I use, and those of my family members, in that direction. I don't think email is a good "host at home" candidate, personally. Anti-spam services benefit too much from an economy of scale that comes from shared hosting. Having said that, though, I've hosted my email (SMTP and IMAP) on a consumer-grade Internet since June 2004. I've had outages because of service-provider issues (Time Warner) once in awhile, but the outages of significant duration (24 - 36 hours) have been either I was using unreliable old hardware. In those outages my secondary MX picked up my mail just fine and I worked from cached email on my personal computers. Assuming I was using more robust hardware or, for that matter, more simple hardware (a plug-computer that I could swap with a spare, moving an SD card containing all my email and configuration between) I wouldn't have ever had an outage longer than 8 hours since 2004. If the server was in a larger city (rather than the rural setting where it's hosted) I don't think I would have suffered thru than 8 hour power outage, either. The Tent protocol sounds like something that would work best hosted by your ISP, a third-party hosting service, or a rented platform in a third-party data center ("the cloud"). (It actually sounds like a naive re-implementation of some of the functionality of SMTP.) The things I'm most interested in hosting at home are things like home automation and Internet-connected appliances / devices. These products typically aren't going to be receiving requests from a large number of Internet hosts, don't necessarily need 24 x 7 uptime, and, most importantly, won't work if the home's Internet connection or power has failed (and, thus, don't gain any reliability benefit by being "cloud"-based). |