Outsourcing IT?

I'm slowly considering outsourcing more of my home IT infrastructure. It's just not interesting to me anymore, and there are services out there that can do it better.

Take my mail, for instance. I just don't have the energy to track all the spam and maintain my infrastructure anymore. A long time ago, when my mail server was a sun4c running SunOS 4.1.4, I was using the bleeding edge version of cyrus-imapd. I think that was around 1.5 at the time. I had a variety of patches I'd made for it including LDAP authentication, RADIUS authentication, some code to ignore the mbox style From header, and most relevant here, the zlib patch.

The zlib patch allowed me to store a compressed form of my mail. In practice, this required 50% as much disk space as uncompressed storage, which was very useful for me, because it was the difference between having enough space for my mail and not having enough space for my mail. However, the cyrus guys were just just not interested in taking my patch. You see, disk is cheap and mmap will perform much better than reads and decompresses. Yes, I know. However, several people on the list (myself included) didn't care about performance as much as disk utilization. It performed fine for me with my usage patterns, and it was a compile time option, so who cared?

OK, now to the present. I now have an IMAP server that's archaic (even though it's the second physical machine to run this software after the first one died). Thanks to the auto* tools, I can't even figure out how to generate a configure script for a modern version of cyrus so I can begin to bring my patch up so it could read the hundreds of thousands of mail messages I have stored in cyrus. My LDAP server died, so I had to figure out how to get an alternate authentication up quickly one day. I decided to fall back on RADIUS (which required a recompile). All of the open source RADIUS servers that are out there to replace the Livingston server are way, way too complicated to get going at all just for simple password auth, so I ended up using an old Livingston RADIUS installation I had and trying to rush to get the credentials into it.

Mostly, though, email just isn't interesting to me anymore. I used to write software to deal with all of the details of email. I had these extravagent web based mail server managers I'd written and complicated procmail configs, and NNTP gateways, and a webmail system I wrote one night, and phone interfaces and IMAP tunneling, and custom IMAP clients and custom IMAP servers, and my badass greylisting application suite, and blah blah blah. Email's done. Now it's just a maintenance burden.

Enter Google Apps for Your Domain. Certainly way less functionality than I've got at home, but so what? It's less stuff I've got to think about. It works remotely. They can deal with my backups (though I'll probably write something to automatically pull it all down for local backups). My users can manage their own filters. They can each have 2GB of mail. If it starts to suck, I'll just pull it. I still control my DNS, so nobody has to know. It's a win all around.

In addition to email, I'm also using Google Calendar. When I did my recent web server upgrade, I didn't create my calendar synchronization space I once had. It was one of the many things left on my TODO list. Now it's...not. We'll just edit the calendars online. They'll still pull down into iCal so we can have local/offline views, and they can SMS us when it's time to do something.

I used to be one of the I'll never put my data on someone else's server guys, but it's just getting too expensive for me to keep up with stuff on my own end, and I've pretty much given up on ever getting a decent apprentice to help me keep stuff going (or at least keep me interested in keeping my own stuff going).