Affordable & Reliable Email Hosting? 37
sarcast asks: "I am looking for an affordable email-only solution for basically forwarding any emails from a domain name (info@yourdomain.com) to someone's personal email account (me@myISP.com). The point being that the person can buy a domain name and then if they decide they want to change ISPs, it is just a simple matter of forwarding to another address. With the recent downturn of some ISPs, people that have had their email address with a certain provider for years, will probably lose them. There are plenty of people out there offering to host my email, but they package it with a website deal which is a waste if all I want is just an email package. Has anyone had good experiences with any company in particular?" This was last asked over a year ago, has
there been any new developments on this front?
winternet (Score:2, Informative)
its not just email hosting, its considerd a shell account (no eggs) but you do have access to bitchx as a bonus
so far i havent had any problems with it, its pop3
i can send and receive using my domain name for about $15 a month
Great site (Score:2, Informative)
hushmail.com (Score:1, Informative)
bsdwebhosting (Score:1, Informative)
What is good, what is affordable - parameters?? (Score:3, Informative)
. .
What exactly do you consider good, cheap or reliable?
Firstly though, how are those emails being "forwarded"? I presume they're just being relayed on from someone's MTA via an existing MX records in an active zone file, but I can't tell.
The cheapest service for this I've found comes bundled with registration from www.GANDI.net, a French company (good English though:) run by Linux geeks who'll charge you c. $17 p.a. for registration and mail / web forwarding. GANDI are primarily registrars, I've plugged them elsewhere, and recently I've been playing with their newly added service features as you'll see below . .
Beware email forwarding! The GANDI service, along with others puts a *limit* on the size of emails to be forwarded. GANDI limits to a useless 800k, other providers such as DomainDirect limit at 2MB, which is also often quite hopeless.
I really don't recommend DomainDirect now because they never respond to real obvious security concerns, such as passing clear text usr / pwd combinations via urls from non ssl pages. I have to deal with them for a client who is stuck with them pro - tem due to them being his OpenSRS reseller. I used to use them a while back, and until they started to be unresponsive, causing International direct calls to discover and resolve problems I liked these guys a lot. Heck, I even endorsed them for their testimonials page. Meanwhile, I'm just moving the OpenSRS domains bought via them to another registrar.
However if you really wanted to you could sign up to DomainDirect without them having control over your domain. Let them assign themselves as tech contact, add their nameservers and zone files for your domain, then replace their tech contact authority.
Doing something like I just suggested has pitfalls though, depending on how your registrar maintains NS entries. Here I have to give some respect to Network Solutions - they have the cleanest wasy to maintain NS entries because you can update these with them as you would like without any bother from your ISP or service provider. Don't flame me now, I *know* how hard it is to change authorities with NetSol registered domains if you're not the right contact! But other instances, such as the DomainDirect situation,, where they are also your OpenSRS reseller, and you're locked in to that arrangement because OpenSRS won't let you renew directly with them, only via your reseller, or even GANDI, are less good in actual fact than NetSol. This is because you can find yourself locked into a game of NS delegation. If you have a link between a registrar and a service provider, they seem always to play tricks to keep you using _them_ and only _them_ - or b*&^er off. I could go on, but I need to get to the beef in this post.
GANDI now throw in a DNS service, which appears reliable, and I've been testing what can be done with this - you can never have enough nameservers, even if like me, you'll have DNS hosted elsewhere as well! :) But beware, once you take up their "forwarding" option (you@yourdomain.com to you@yourisp.com) , the only way _after_this_ to correctly mod your DNS entries, say by adding an MX 20 or extra nameserver, appears to require taking yourself out their DNS, by *removing* their zone files, then starting again. So you'd get in the way of propagation delays whilst you make the change, with no chance to add extra NS in the meantime to pick up the traffic.
Naturally I'm contacting them to let them know my experience, and I guess they may correct this sharpish, but I was up _very_ late last night doing just that for a new domain - actually going the whole hog and just replacing their nameservers with mine in frustration, having not found my way to navigate how their web interface wants to do things. That kinda sucks, and I'd even say this was brain-dead, but otherwise their interface is really simple, and you can add A, MX, CNAME, NS entries straight up.
So another question is clearly : are you hosting your own DNS? And do you want more than one mailserver / MX entry? (for redundancy)
I really don't think that there's any possibility to just point an MX record at a regular ISP MTA, as sendmail or whatever is being used needs to accept mail from you@yourdomain.com and I take a bet no average ISP will do that for you.
Since you can tell I've been doing this recently, I have to say that I can fix something admirable for you if you mail me your situation, requests, number of accounts et.c.
This could be done two ways, I can get you hosted for POP3 and simple (not many entries) DNS for c. $95 pa This via my buddy who's helping me out installing and provisioning a nice new server for me. For a bit more, but not massively more, I could put you on my own host (which lives - or is to live, see below - on my associate's network, fire-walled yada yadda) and on iPlanet Messaging Server, which is one darn nice MTA and does IMAP, S/MIME CERT-auth, webmail over SSL with tricks like synching address books between MTA and webmail via ldap. iPlanet even does WAP for mobile phone access, but I'm only just looking into this option, and requirements for gateways, WML etc. right now. Cosmetic options can be added for a little more too - you could have your logos splattered on the webmail interface, since this appears doable according to the manuals (and I have a background in design so it'd look okay:)
If you don't know already, IMAP rocks as you're not forced to download every email to your client, your mail is kept in a database on the server, so you can use different clients with some impunity, not worrying to manually synch your inbox / outbox etc. However this means server storage space, so that would have to be agreed and set, and aspects such as this will affect the price to you. As we've not yet set any commercial pricing policy, this would have to be worked out ad hoc right now.
There is a caveat with the iPlanet arrangement - 1. Host arriving today, 2. being based in the UK, where corps honestly make it *hard* for you to buy stuff from them, I'm forced to wait for a physical delivery of media to get the serial number for iPlanet so as to generate a license. This crap wouldn't have happened if I'd been in the US, but SUN refuse Intl. customers from their online store. Gripe, grumble, rant. Seriously, I should have not bothered to get tangled with the UK sales outfits. For clarity, I'm London UK based (shortly to set up a coupla' small hosts here to replicate, provide fail-over for mail etc.) and my associate is in Virginia USA. So you can have two geographic points of contact for support / accounts / admin! :)
So to sum up, if you want quick and cheerful, maybe DNS also but happy with POP3, I'll pass you straight to my buddy. You'l have no problems, he's a true uber- geek with plenty years designing and managing large networks. That'll certainly be cheapest, and almost instant. For this I'll not get myself in the loop on that more than is necessary.
If you want something _nicer_ (iPlanet) you can have that too, and I'll go ahead and see how best I can arrange things for you. But what with Christmas business and all you may have to wait a moment. Or you could go the simple option and upgrade when everything is set, and we know your requirements.
Without a doubt, I had the same dang problem as you're asking about for a _long_ while, and the only way forward was to team up and - in the New Year - offer decent email on a small scale commercial basis, initially to people we know by reference.
Heck, I hope that answered some of your questions! :) Anything else just mail me (you'll have to edit my mail to get through, but I check that Hotmail account regularly, and will come back to you with my corp email address if you're serious) I'd post our website, but the dang thing is still getting it's zone files about the place, and it's premature to put up some promotional blurb. Good luck, however you choose!
imap-partners.net (Score:2, Informative)
It's not cheap ($15 a month) but it beats the alternative. An account with them, coupled with a good DNS provider [easydns.com] should work wonders for you. Besides, all they do is email and if it doesn't work, it directly impacts their business. Unlike a lot of the bozos whose primary business is web hosting and email is an extra.