
Ask HN: Simplest email setup for slicehost-ed domain? - wr1472
I have a domain setup on slicehost for a project I am open sourcing soon (http://wsl.xqoob.com), I want to setup email for this domain but do not want to go through the hassle of setting up and administering email servers myself.<p>Question: What's the easiest/lowest overhead way of creating an email with a @xqoob.com extension for this slicehost account?<p>TIA
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timf
Google Apps is free and fast to set up for mail@yourdomain.com

<http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html>

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intranation
Works for me, too. I'm more than comfortable maintaining all kinds of server
side stuff, but mail is just too much for me. Spam in particular is a pain--
Google's spam filters work really well, and you get a good web interface to
boot.

One caveat: Yahoo! and Hotmail often block email originating from Google Apps
accounts: this has happened to me (with personal emails) from two separate
domains (one of them is a work one).

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nkohari
If you're only interested in receiving email, Google Apps for Domains is
great. If you need to send it (for example, as part of your service), you
should check out AuthSMTP (<http://authsmtp.com/>).

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mc
You can also use Google Apps for your Domain to send emails. I even wrote a
Rails plugin for doing just that:

<http://github.com/openrain/action_mailer_tls>

There may be an outgoing limit, but I've personally never encountered it.

~~~
callmeed
We actually send mail through Google Apps and our rails help ticket system.
Just got hit with a sending quota the other day. Didn't get a number, just
that we sent too many.

------
pert
If you're looking to configure mail from your slicehost and you do go with the
Google Apps option (that's what I use), you might like to have a look at this
guide to getting sSMTP working with Google:

<http://wiki.debian.org/sSMTP>

I can't recommend sSMTP enough to anyone that doesn't want to maintain a mail
server. All UNIX systems should be able to send mail and this is very much
still the case on modern Linux systems, but this is often overlooked.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
I also am using the sSMTP + Google Apps combination. It's fantastic and even
if I bork up my server I can still send and receive email to my domain.

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oomkiller
Google Apps is a good way to go, but personally I prefer Dovecot and Postfix
for my email servers.

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jrockway
I agree -- maintaining your own email server is no harder than maintaining a
web server (or anything else). The default configuration of exim that comes
with Debian works well enough for me. (Although I did need to tweak it to add
spam filtering and support for my "legacy" qmail addresses.)

I also buy DynDNS' backup MX service. That way, if I fuck up my server, I will
get my mail as soon as the server is back up (instead of whenever the sending
server decides to resend it, which could be never).

~~~
oomkiller
I disagree that it's as easy as Nginx or Apache (webservers), but with Google,
there are treasure troves of information about doing it yourself.

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mahmud
Google apps had email for free when I signed up, but not it's $50/year.

<http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html>

Ideally, you wanna look for hosted mail services; all you would have to do is
update your DNS records and set the MX records to their servers. You would
then point your mail reader to their servers for IMAP/POP and SMTP.

Postfix is not too hard either, but spam will give real pain.

~~~
timf
Google Apps is still free, you are linking to the business edition which is
$50/year

~~~
mahmud
glad to be wrong! cheers.

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ericb
In the latest Ubuntu, mail setup is much easier. Might be worth checking out.
It isn't fancy out of the box, but it might be good enough and you can iterate
and extend later.

[http://ubuntuserver.wordpress.com/2009/02/13/an-improved-
mai...](http://ubuntuserver.wordpress.com/2009/02/13/an-improved-mail-server-
stack-in-jaunty-dovecot-and-postfix-integration/)

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mc
If you do go with Google Apps for your Domain, you can use the following
script (in Ruby) to automatically configure the appropriate DNS entries on
Slicehost:

<http://github.com/postpostmodern/slicehost-dns/tree/master>

Run it from the command line and it'll setup everything for you.

~~~
calvin
I've used this script and it's saved me a lot of work. It reduces the time
setting up DNS from 30 minutes (give or take depending on how many CNAMEs, A
records, and MX records you need) to about 10 seconds.

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alexmacgregor
Google Apps definetly. As mentioned, the interface is great and search
functionality is offcourse excellent. (Not to mention storage)

~~~
wr1472
The overwhelming consensus seems to be Google Apps. I did come across this
whilst briefly looking into the problem. I will most likely go down this
route, even though I am not afraid to setup and administer email, it is not my
primary concern and would much rather offload that to a 3rd party.

thanks all!

