

Ask HN: E-mail providers and mail servers - izak30

I don't want to start providing e-mail service for my clients, but recent incidents with my current provider have driven me to take my business elsewhere, or roll my own.<p>What do you use for an e-mail provider, if you run your own servers for your app?<p>If you do/don't run your own mail server, why?
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martian
One option would be to buy cheap shared hosting plans (I've seen as low as
$6/mo) and use them only for email. Not always perfect, and things like SSL
might be messier, but cheap and easy and these days you'll get as much if not
more storage as Google Apps. One drawback to a shared plan is that you might
be on the same IP as some spammer and you might get blacklisted. SPF records
are easy to set up and can really help with that.

I used to manage an email server and it was not very pleasant for someone who
just wanted to hack. :-) If you do end up running your own mail server(s)
you'll want to be sure you have good spam/virus filtering or users will start
complaining. I had really good luck installing Postini a couple years ago --
reduced spam by nearly 100%.

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qhoxie
Depending on your requirements, Google Apps have been a pleasure to work with
for a number of my projects.

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izak30
Yeah, I would like something that is a little easier to manage for multiple
domains, GA has no unified control panel, although I would gladly pay for one
if it existed.

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modoc
Personally, I run postfix and uw-imap (although there are many good imap
options out there) on a dedicated server. It's easy, very solid, and I can do
all kinds of neat tricks with it as needed. Plus if ever goes down, I can go
in and fix it myself.

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izak30
Can you help? <http://charleston.craigslist.org/cpg/878965203.html> (this is
me)

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modoc
I'm not sure you can support TLS (SSL) on multiple domains, at least not
without running different postfix instances on unique IP:ports for each
domain. Unless you're just using sub-domains and have a wildcard cert.

It's the same issue you run into trying to host multiple SSL protected sites
on the same IP. The server (Apache or Postfix) has to serve out the cert to
encrypt the channel before reading the request data (which might contain the
domain the client is connecting to).

If you just want to have TLS setup on a primary domain, and also handle mail
for other domains (without SSL protection), that's pretty easy.

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izak30
It was my understanding that the cert was for the domain of the server and not
of the e-mail address.

If I have this completely wrong, let me know.

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modoc
correct, the cert is for the domain, however in your CL posting you said you
needed multiple domain virtual hosting. The cert is specific to a mail server
hostname. It really depends on how you want the actual MX record and outgoing
mail server setup.

So if you're hosting three domains: domainone.com, domaintwo.com, and
domainthree.com, you have a few options.

You can set the MX of all three domains to mail.mymailserver.com, and have a
single cert. However, that means all of your end users will have to point
their IMAP/POP clients and outgoing SMTP server settings to
mail.mymailserver.com, instead of mail.domainonce.com which might seem more
logical to them. It also means that your outgoing mail headers will show the
mail.mymailserver.com hostname, and you'll need to setup the right SPF records
to avoid being flagged as spam due to domain mis-match.

Or you can set the MX for each domain to mail.domainone.com,
mail.domaintwo.com, etc...

It really depends on your needs, and the needs of the client/users who are
checking and sending mail, and how public you want the fact that all the
domains are on the same server.

Feel free to follow up with me via e-mail. devon@digitalsanctuary.com

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izak30
As a final note, we've ended up choosing FuseMail, if you have any questions
about them, let me know.

