SOHO Email Hosting or Alternatives

[David J Berube]

Hey all,

I'd like to recommend a Cpanel or DirectAdmin based web host option - 
you can get email hosting with nearly any spam filters, web based 
account administration, forwards, mailing lists, and more at nearly any 
price point - some even as little as five or ten dollars a month. The 
control panel interface is typically very easy to use, and will manage 
your DNS without a problem. It's basically point and click, and most 
webhosts will have a few webmail clients for you to use as well. Control 
panels are not as flexible as having root access, true, but nearly all 
common situations are covered by them - if you need to run a cluster of 
Mongrel web apps with CPU-heavy ffmpeg processes running in the 
background, you might need to do your own sysadmining, but for a mail 
server, you should be all set with Cpanel, Directadmin, H-sphere, et al.

In fact, the web hosting industry is hugely competitive and over 
saturated, and virtually any webhost should be able to take care of most 
of the situation mentioned here. For simple mail hosting, I wouldn't 
bother with a VPS - a virtual web host is a simpler, cheaper solution.

(Frankly, I personally prefer dedicated hosts anyway - VPSes are 
typically oversold and usually, at least in my opinion, you get less 
bang for your buck. Of course, you can't get a useful dedicated machine 
  for less than $80 or so, even from a budget provider like HiVelocity 
or LayeredTech.)

I get my web hosting recommendations from webhostingtalk.com, and for 
what it's worth, I've had great experience with hostmatters.com.

Take it easy,

David Berube
Berube Consulting
djberube at berubeconsulting.com
(603)-485-9622
http://www.berubeconsulting.com/

Lloyd Kvam wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-04-23 at 20:20 -0400, Ben Scott wrote:
>> On 4/23/07, Python <python at venix.com> wrote:
>>>> Mailbox host rejects spam message during SMTP, alias host tries to
>>>> send a DSN for spam message, which bounces, resulting in backscatter
>>>> problems and lots of headaches for alias host postmaster.
>>> I don't really understand this point.  Aren't DSN concerns essentially
>>> the same between the alias host and the mailbox host?
>>   A lot of mail servers reject spam during the SMTP transaction.  If
>> there is no forwarding involved, the spam cannons just bounce off the
>> mail server.  (Legitimate failures generate a DSN at the originating
>> system, which also works fine.)  But add in an alias/forwarding
>> system.  Now the alias host accepts the spam, and tries to forward it
>> on to the forwarding target.  The target MX rejects during the SMTP
>> transaction from the forwarder.  Since the forwarder is not the
>> originator, it has to generate a DSN, and then attempt to deliver said
>> DSN to the originating system, based on the information from the SMTP
>> envelope.  
> 
> OK.  I see what you're saying.  I assume my server tolerance for "bad
> email" matches reasonably well to the final server (Maybe it's fussier).
> If it was good enough for my server, it will also be acceptable to the
> mailbox server.  I am not generating many DSNs.
> 
>> Since that information is almost always forged, the alias
>> host ends up trying to deliver tons of DSNs to all sorts of bogus
>> addresses -- some of which match to real people, who then email the
>> postmaster of the alias host and ask them to stop emitting
>> backscatter.  (Or, more likely, threaten bodily harm and/or legal
>> action.)
>>
>>   Did that make sense, or just confuse the issue further?  :)
> 
> Thanks for taking the trouble to explain.
> 
> One other item I've noticed.  More and more mail servers are not
> bothering to report delivery failures.  I get complaints about
> undelivered emails and I respond with log entries showing that their ISP
> accepted the email for delivery.  Presumably the email got silently
> shunted into the spam heap.
> 
>> -- Ben
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