E-mail Hosting

I don't trust free web-based e-mail solutions that parse my sh!t for keywords and then display targeted advertisements all over my inbox. Screw you gmail.

I'm toying with the idea of forking over a couple bucks a month for a dedicated e-mail hosting service. Not too sure what I should be looking for though. It's just for personal use, so 1GB of storage would probably be more than I ever need and I guess reliability wouldn't need to be 5 nines

Anyone have tips or personal stories they can share that relate to such services? The Do's and Don'ts?

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Comments

Daniel333

Set your own up at home.

Static IP + buy a domain + a Linux box = win. More fun, and a tad bit more secure.

CChN

Daniel333 wrote: »

Set your own up at home.

Static IP + buy a domain + a Linux box = win. More fun, and a tad bit more secure.

I've thought about this, but reliability is the killer, no? What would power consumption look like for running a small server in the living room year round?

exampasser

Daniel333 wrote: »

Set your own up at home.

Static IP + buy a domain + a Linux box = win. More fun, and a tad bit more secure.

Is it possible to use dynamic dns to get way with using a dynamic IP or do all mail servers these days reject all mail from dynamic IPs?

ehnde

It's not worth it to run a dedicated mail server from home. Home internet service isn't reliable enough, and if you're worried about the cost of electricity you're probably not going to want to pay for a static i.p. either.

I recommend a VPS (virtual private server). One company I've used is Cheap VPS Hosting, Unmanaged VPS Hosting, Managed VPS Hosting, VPS Hosts, Cheapest VPS, Virtual Private Server Hosting from Virpus.com. It's a dedicated, always on virtual machine. You can even remote reboot or remote reinstall the OS, or switch linux distributions.
at $5/month you can host a mail server, and also anything else you might have a personal need for.

There are other companies out there that can lease you a VPS. It's a cutthroat business and prices are always coming down.

Lizano

exampasser wrote: »

Is it possible to use dynamic dns to get way with using a dynamic IP or do all mail servers these days reject all mail from dynamic IPs?

The RDNS for the IP where the mail is coming from will not match the name of the A record for the domain, so most servers like yahoo, hotmail, and gmail, will reject it.

MentholMoose

Not to mention that most residential ISPs either already block tcp/25 inbound, or block it on occasion, and may even block it outbound.

msteinhilber

I run my own e-mail at home as of a couple months ago now, I much prefer having it all in my own control instead of somebody else.

I use the Mail Reflector service from No-IP - Dynamic DNS, Static DNS for Your Dynamic IP which does a number of things for me, most importantly it overcomes the fact that most ISP's block port 25. They accept mail through their servers and it gets sent to a port I specify on my home server. They include virus and spam filtering as well, though easy to do at home it is nice having that traffic eliminated from ever reaching my home network. They hold mail for a week, in case some event occurs where my server isn't available.

Overall it works great for me, but if I had Internet reliability issues I would reconsider. My service though is pretty much rock solid with my uptime greater than most of the T1's or business class cable or DSL lines we have at the office.

So it's an option if you do want to run your own service, costs me about $40 a year.

MentholMoose

msteinhilber wrote: »

They include virus and spam filtering as well, though easy to do at home it is nice having that traffic eliminated from ever reaching my home network.

This is an important point. I've had email on my own domain for years now, and I've had some bad experiences with spam. You will receive spam constantly; it will eat up your bandwidth even if it's to a non-existing address on your domain, if it's not filtered outside your network. For this reason alone I wouldn't host email at my house.

However, the worst situation I've had was not being the recipient of spam, rather it was being the (spoofed) sender. Someone did a spam run using random source addresses from my domain, and thousands of email servers started sending delivery failure messages to those random addresses. The server was receiving thousands of emails per second which brought it down.

Daniel333

Small Business DSL is plenty reliable and as far as power concerns. You could run this on an ATOM notebook with MHZ and RAM to spare. So we are talking next to nothing in cost there.

And really, it's all about the experience.

shon541

Might be overkill for you, but I host my email (with my own domain) at fastmail.fm.