PiMail: Affordable, lightweight and energy-efficient private email infrastructure

Third-party Email services, whether a free webmail or corporate service hosted somewhere over the Internet, requires sacrifice of control and flexibility over personal communication. This make emails vulnerable to privacy leaks due to unauthorized access and inspection. In this paper, we propose PiMail, an affordable, lightweight and energy- efficient private email infrastructure, for individuals and small enterprises, based on Raspberry Pi. We also deployed a testbed implementation of PiMail using Raspbian OS, Postfix mail transfer agent (MTA), ClamAV antivirus and SpamAssassin. Based on our in-depth performance evaluation we conclude that PiMail is fully capable of providing email services to individuals and SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first extensive study to evaluate and benchmark the efficacy of using Raspberry Pi as low-cost and portable mail server.