email privacy

[E. Hakan Duran]

Dear all,

I am trying to improve my email privacy and thought that this would be a great platform to ask questions to a bunch of smart people. I would love to be able to do all this using Kontact/Kmail, so it is not totally off-topic in my opinion.

The idea is to delete emails from the server upon download, just like the default case for POP3, to decrease their exposure to surveillance by interested parties. However, this has the disadvantage of not being able to access those emails from multiple clients, like smart phone, tablet, etc. One solution I thought as a workaround for this disadvantage was to set up a mail server at home LAN, which would keep the (presumably) only copy of these emails and be accessable by multiple clients. Does anybody here have sucha a set up? Do you think it would work? Does anybody have a more practical/easier solution? I am not too excited about setting up and maintaining a home email server with my level of expertise. I believe it is not within the limits of ISP contract to run an email server at home either, which may potentially  get one in trouble. Additionally, this home email server may get blacklisted, if not set up or maintained correctly, as far as I can tell.Would SMTP relay help prevent it? If SMTP relay is used, will there be a copy of sent emails in the original account's Sent folder?

Another question is how would this home email server download and delete the copy on the original email account? Would this task require automatic email forwarding by the original account instead? Or would it require another piece of middle man software?

I am sorry for my long list of questions. I would be very interested in hearing your thoughts, solutions, recommendations, as well as pointers for me to read.

Thank you very much for your time and input.

Hakan
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