The Zimbra Open Source Edition is probably a very good choice.
- 99% of all companies don't need features then the open source edition.
- it supports large mailboxes very well. ( some of our employees have 21gb mailboxes, it still runs smooth )
- You can buy a plugin for encryption if you really need it.
- Mail (IMAP), Calender (iCal) and adressbook (LDAP) sync is possible to almost any device.
- You can always get the commercial version if you need the extras.

I don't think you can remotely wipe your mail using an open source product but nowadays you might simply get any android of iphone device and use a wiping app. Maybe not as convenient but it works.

Spamassasin can work very well ( it certainly does for us ) using external blocklists and distributed mail analysis services ( dcc, razor2 ) in addition to it's core filters. We added greylisting as well. Everything runs as part of the Amavis product. We don't use Bayesian filtering though. While good on paper we found it to be to unpredictable in real life. ( people reporting valid mailing lists as spam instead of unsubscribing, etc ) Instead we added around 15 additional custom spam filter lines over the years but that's it. Now all our spam is gone. We filter mail for over 1500 domains and our customers have never been happier.

As someone who actually went to Nepal i can tell you that you will need permits for almost everything you do as a tourist.
I guess i can't really blame them. They aren't the richest country and tourism is thier main source of income.

SIP en XMPP both work like mail.

Well, at work i am using the debian 6 version on my desktop.
For a long time it was the only distribution you could find that would actually provide you with a stable and well working kde version.

I'll be upgrading when the debian 7 version comes out. whenever that will be.
And you know, that suits me just fine.

The only packages i upgraded are firefox, chrome, flash and libreoffice.
Other than that i had no need to run any linux distribution more current than debian 6.

It is part of a deal to have a more diverse group of stakeholders.
So you are indeed right that this shows nothing about the performance of google.
And i guess the money will always come in handy as well. :P

Or we could have a better incremental tax system where dirt poor is not the bottom and fat rich is not the top.

From what i understood this is not what they do.
They check what key strokes have been entered in the past second and at what interval.
They then transmit all this information to the other side where this is being shown.
So while typing, one XML request / second is being send.

Still a lot of xml requests, but a nice compromise if you want natural typing in semi-realtime ( one second delay ).

The Netherlands is the second country in the world to do so. ( Chili was the first ) I'd say that counts as "much earlier than anyone else".
It is however true that at the same other people are considering putting quite dangerous infrastructure in place ( mostly under child pornography banner )
Nevertheless, this is still a move in the right direction.

Yeah, but that kills all the other plasma functions on the desktop.
Not really the way to go now is it...

Just upgrade your kernel using a manual build of the 2.6 kernel.
Also install static versions of the modutils ( insmod, modprobe, etc )
Use an external ( a machine with decent software ) for this so your compile doesn't break.
I have done so in the past and it works fine. ( and plan an update for those machines, anything with 2.4 is way to old... )

After that you can just use R1Soft hot copy,
http://www.r1soft.com/tools/linux-hot-copy/

This program is free ( as in beer ) to download and works with every block device.
You can even write to a block device if you really need to.

Their commercial offerings are pretty good as good. ( and DO work with the 2.4 kernel )
We use it here at work.

I heard btrfs supports something like this as well.

Any way, good luck!

Thanks for the feedback!

I am really looking forward to it.

You know it's actually quite easy to have multiple block devices using drbd and make them available to your VM? You can specify as many drbd devices as you like in your config. I am currently using one for root and one for swap.

disk = [
  'drbd:drbd-server1-root,xvda1,w',
  'drbd:drbd-server1-swap,xvda2,w',
]

I am no expert at this but couldn't you use a third drbd block for storing the journal that keeps track of all the changes and use that for recovery?

I suppose it would cause some writes all over the disk, so that might get tricky to get optimized. But it does come with the advantage that it doesn't do any strange things to the data on the drbd device all the time :)

Either that, or i am completely misunderstanding you :)

Have fun and keep up the good work ;)