I'm a long-time Gmail user and love the slick web interface. I love the searchability, threading of emails, intuitive reply mechanism, built-in chat, etc. However, I don't have full control over it. I would like to run my own mail server, with my own domain, and host a comparable web interface to it for my own purposes. Built-in chat would be great (maybe compatible with XMPP so I could still chat with my Gmail contacts).<p>Does anyone know of a package out there that fits the bill? I'm not looking for "Google Apps for your Domain". Does anyone else think this would be useful?
I would advise against running your own web server unless you really know what you are doing. I'm sure you know how to setup a web server, but email deliverability (getting past spam filters of the big email providers) is a huge pain in the <i></i>*. So much that I don't even attempt it these days, I just outsource my email.
Given the fact that server failure is a 'when', not an 'if', I'd recommend using "Google Apps for your Domain". It takes the hassle out of it all (as you already likely already know!) and leaves you (and your team?) free to focus on making money.
I don't know of anything that will give you anything even close to Gmail as far as an interface/search/chat. Also, running your own email server is basically saying "sign me up for an endless source of pain". At my current job, when we were hosting our own email, I was spending 4-5 hours a month on email issues on average. Google Apps is either free or $50/user/year - although it is a bit less flexible, it is well worth it to me.