SOHO Email Hosting or Alternatives

[Bill Freeman]

Ted Roche writes:
 > I've heard this question offline a couple of times in the past few
 > months, and Ben has started nagging me to put it online:
 > 
 > What are some good alternatives for a Small Office - Home Office
 > business for setting up email for their domain?
 > 
 > The smallest of businesses can get by with an account from their local
 > ISP, example at conknet.com may be fine for a single craftsperson business.
 > But if you're a slightly bigger business and are dealing with other
 > businesses, you really want a sales@, info@, postmaster@, webmaster@,
 > abuse@, support@ and individual accounts for your workers, spam
 > filtering, remote/web access, etc.
 > 
 > How do other SOHOs handle this? Suggestions welcomed from all.

Note: I haven't done this, but it seems straight forward if your
ISP provides the feature.

MV, and probably other ISPs, offers a catch all feature that is a
halfway house to running your own server.  You can have a mailbox that
receives all mail to your domain whose user name portion doesn't match
that of one of your explicitly named mailboxes or one of their
aliases.  You can then use, for example, fetchmail to grab the stuff
from this mailbox and locally redistribute/filter it based on the
envelope "to" address.  The ISP may also offer some amount of
configurable filtering, reducing the amount of poorly addressed spam
you have to download in order to filter.

Such a mailbox would fill up fast if your fetchmail process/system
went down, leading to mailbox full rejections, so, in a business
context, you might want a separate network monitor box to raise the
alarm if it didn't see successful POP connections between fetchmail
box and the ISP for a while.  You can probably also negotiate a very
large mailbox from the ISP.

There are cheesier ways of doing this sort of thing, involving the
user name suffix separated by "+" or "-" that the ISP ignores when
dispatching on user name, but the catch all mailbox seems best if it's
available.

Bill