NHS net limits us nowadays to 50-200 megabyte. Not a lot considering all those PCT adminroids who will without further thought send out emails with 5 megabyte attachments and more.
What is there to do?
Create your own mailserver in the practice! Half a mailserver to be accurate.
A mail server will enable you to store all NHSnet mail and serve it within the practice to all client computers. It will make archiving easy and allow you to filter out the ubiquitous garbage we receive and conserve the meagre bandwidth most of us enjoy on N3. Massive attachments are downloaded once into the practice and then, if re-read, will only require reloading within your own LAN.
Half a mail server?
Yes! A proper mail server is capable of receiving and sending emails and serving it or distributing it to the various local recipients. The sending bit is what would create difficulties for you with your NHS IT "support". We are not supposed to mess with the wider NHS network. Sending emails via your own email server would seem too close to comfort for most NHS IT "workers". So we cut that one out.
So, receiving emails and local distribution and serving is what we will require.
This will require three things:
Most Linux distributions are perfectly capable of doing this. I prefer for my practice Ubuntu or Debian, but this is because I know these well.
Dovecot is a very capable IMAP and POP server which comes with most Linux distributions as an easily installible package.
Getmail is a small but equally very capable programme which allows downloading emails from a variety of sources (for us this will be NHSnet).
More later
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