I was thinking, in light of the fact that all our data, including this blog, is being scrutinized by foreign (to me and most internet users) powers, that maybe one should try to replace Google Apps and Outlook.com, well Google Apps really. The problem is that Google Apps is pretty damn useful.

So what does one need? I have no money to spend, so it has to be free.

One needs a full featured SMTP server, a good web interface with simple design that also renders well on mobile in which you can search through (and find!) email and appointments. Some would argue that you need chat and video conferencing as well, and I guess one where neither Chinese nor US military is also on the call would be preferable, but I can live without it.

I cannot, however, live without civilized charset support. As in, working iso-8859-1 or something proper that can display the letters of honor and might, aka åäö. It would also not seem like a grown-up solution if it wasn’t trivial to add encryption and/or signing of e-mails.

You also need shared calendars and the option of reserving common resources. Not perhaps in the home, but the very first thing you do when you use shared calendars in a company is that you start booking things, such as conference rooms, portable projectors et c.

The user catalog needs to be easily managed. You need folders/labels of some kind and filters to manage the flow of e-mail.

I also, probably, need a way to access my e-mail via IMAP.

So the question is, how much of this do I have to build? How much exists in Linux? Does it look decent or does it look Linuxy? By decent I mean Web 2.0-ish, as opposed to linuxy or Windowsy, such as outlook web access.

I’d like any suggestion. I am prepared to code, albeit in C#/mono, but I would love to use as much Linux OSS available as I probably suck at writing this kind of stuff compared to those who have already done so.

So far I have found the following:
http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-server-ubuntu-13.04-nginx-bind-dovecot-ispconfig-3
But instead of an ISP tool a custom website? Perhaps solr or lucene indexing each user’s maildir. But what about a calendar?

Why not just install Citadel?
This requires testing.