Hosted E-mail services suggestions

[Fernando Duran]

----- Original Message -----
> From: Sadiq Saif <sadiq at asininetech.com>
> To: tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org
> Cc: 
> Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2012 10:19:36 AM
> Subject: [TLUG]: Hosted E-mail services suggestions
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I am looking to move my personal e-mail off Gmail and I'm currently
> looking for hosted (paid) e-mail providers, I'm open to hosting it
> myself as well (VPS/Dedicated server).
> 
> I'm currently evaluating a few choices:
> - Fastmail
> - Office365 e-mail
> - VPS (with Postfix + Dovecot) [already set up, just a matter of
> changing MX records and making accounts]
> 
> Anyone have any thoughts on e-mail DIY versus paying someone to host it?
> --
> Sadiq S
> O< ascii ribbon campaign - stop html mail - www.asciiribbon.org
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Hello,

TL;DR: if you are paranoid with your privacy and/or like to do Linux sysadmin and don't mind losing some emails you can go self-hosted, otherwise I'd recommend outsourcing it.

Btw, any reason you don't like Gmail?

Self-hosting mail in a VPS is easy to start with; pretty much "apt-get install postfix dovecot", put in your domain name and pretty much you are good to go http://rimuhosting.com/support/settingupemail.jsp?mta=postfix . I've been doing sysadmin for a VPS provider and Postfix/dovecot was our combo of choice.

The first problem is spam although almost most of it usually goes away adding a one-liner RBL directive in the Postfix config file: https://gist.github.com/1870498

There are other configuration issues like setting yourself virtual domains, aliases, autoresponders etc, not hard once you know how to do them. Also if you want web-basedd mail you'd need to set it up too (Roundcube, Horde etc). It's definitively a good exercise and learning experience. 

The biggest problem with hosting mail yourself is deliverability.  Due to spammers, mail servers (esp. the big providers like gmail, yahoo, hotmail) tend to reject or even worse drop silently emails coming from new mail servers and sometimes you can't even trust their mail server's responses so you're not sure what happened. There's a couple of things that help, like creating SPF DNS record, setting up reverse DNS etc but at the beginning expect some/many emails not to go through.

Also you have to do general syadmin like monitoring etc and worry about server uptime, random Denial of Service attacks etc. Again, not bad for learning.

For free (gmail etc) or cheaper than a VPS (for ex $2/month http://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/rackspace_email/ ) you are saving yourself a lot of trouble if your email is very important.


Cheers, 

---------------------
Fernando Duran
http://www.fduran.com

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
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