I agree with the general sentiment that maintaining electronic records (and emails are most definitely legal electronic records) is imperative. The IRS suggests maintaining at least 7 years worth of documentation in the event of an audit. It should be no different for electronic records.

Where I don't agree with the general sentiment is the fear-mongering of privacy concerns with gmail. I switched to gmail (via Google Apps) about three years ago. It is without a doubt the best digital move I've ever made. Google's privacy policy is quite clear on how your data is stored and managed.

If you still feel the need to maintain a local archive of your mail records, simply download them on a regular basis to a client of your choice. While I understand the interest of a hobbyist to create some elaborate local server/client for their mail, I (and I suspect many others) have more important things to to with our spare time. Enjoy the services that exist today to help you manage these records, instead of re-inventing the wheel.

I had the same problem with the clock synch running a Fedora VM. I wrote this network timserver pinger and set it up in crontab, works pretty well. Run it every 15 minutes and it resynchs the clock silently (requires a working network connection of course...):

#!/bin/bash
/usr/sbin/ntpdate -s -b -p 8 -u 129.132.1.21