Suggestions for SOHO email service

[Ted Roche]

On Oct 17, 2005, at 12:56 PM, Bill McGonigle wrote:

> It's a social problem, not a technical one.  Many mail system  
> admins refuse mail from servers on a dynamic IP because lots of  
> spam zombies exist in those locations.  You know who to thank for  
> that.

Yes, I've worked at shops that got blacklisted. It's a ugly thing to  
fix.

> Our friends at DynDNS have some services to help:
>   http://www.dyndns.com/services/mailhop/
>
> But my cable modem isn't reliable enough for me to count on it for  
> the business (only ~99.5%) so I got a root server at 1&1 for $50/mo  
> and it's always up, even when Cogent and Level 3 are having a  
> chicken fight.  At least I can get in over Verizon Wireless when  
> the cable modem is down.  Did I mention IMAP is great?

Well, when it came time to choose where to spend my money, I thought  
a cable coming into the office would be a better choice. I can, and  
have, had a couple of machines on the line for transitioning services  
from one machine to the other, failover and that sort of thing.  And  
I can yank the cable out of the back when I'm having a "learning  
experience." With my current budget, I think it would be an either/or  
thing.

With something like the MXBackup from DynDNS, it sounds like putting  
a mail server on the DSL would be reasonable, then. My registrar/DNS  
provider will let me set up an MX record there to point to the  
server. I'll have to update it once every six months or so when my IP  
address changes.  My upstream ISP, TDS, will let me route email  
through their server (I'm currently receiving logwatch notices that  
way). So, it's just a matter of selecting an MX, SMTP, (optional) web  
interface, and spam filtering. Gee, is that all? This could be an  
education experience.

99.5% is not reliable enough for your business? I suppose that's 40  
hours down per year, but my experience with cable is closer to three  
or four nines. Similar uptime for TDS DSL. Knock wood.
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