Email hosting is essentially broken by the state of the internet

*kitchin* · 06-06-2008, 11:18 AM

In my little opinion, the best thing FQ could do for hosting is to figure out a way for its clients to have reliable email service, especially of the outgoing variety. Is it possible that moving to single domain for the mail servers would give them more clout in the world of RBL/etc. blocking, especially to Hotmail? And on the inbound side, a single domain could solve the somewhat absurd situation of Outlook warning on every session that the security cert does not match.

What is the best practice now, how are people setting up their clients' (customers') domain-based email addresses?

1. Inbound: Forwarding to the client's local ISP, such as sbcglobal is no longer recommended by FQ, nor is webmail. So Outlook or Thunderbird would be the way. The help files on that badly need updating, they have screenshots from long ago versions. One of the FQ staff helpfully posted a link to more recent screenshots, from duke.edu.

2. Outbound: DomainKeys recommended. Other than that, we are at the mercy of spurious RBL'ing and unpublicized block lists. These days I never know if my email is going to arrive, so I have to send everything important from Gmail. But a complete Gmail switch is problematic, because for inbound use it polls POP on its own schedule and an immediate POP check cannot easily be requested. So the general outbound situation is just intolerable, as far as I understand it.

*Jeff* · 06-06-2008, 01:53 PM

I've been thinking of switching one domain over to google apps for email.

The godaddy approach of a generic nonbranded domain (secureserver.net in thier case) is also workable.

Neither are as good as the way it is now in terms of branding, flexibility, etc. but...

*Randall* · 06-07-2008, 11:48 AM

I haven't heard any muttering about email not getting through from our FQ domains (Yahoo's greylisting aside). Maybe my users are used to unreliability and don't think to mention it. But I personally rely on it because I'm always moving my laptop around.

Another outgoing option for non-mobile users is to use the ISP's mail server, which may be subject to the same hassles (and be aware that Gmail is under increased scrutiny now, so even that isn't necessarily 100% safe).

Seems that anything short of ditching SMTP just won't help, and I haven't heard any movement in that direction.

Randall

*Jeff* · 06-07-2008, 12:56 PM

Revisiting this topic today, I find the tone of my post above was not quite as I had intended. I was just thinking out loud as I have considered offloading email processing to google apps for example. But overall I find futurequest email to be more reliable than the alternatives. I also fear that going to a single domain, while it would solve the troubling cert error message in the short term, would lock you in, severely limiting options in the future as compared to keeping email @yourdomain.com.

*kitchin* · 06-07-2008, 01:10 PM

I meant the single domain for the server in the POP/IMAP/SMTP settings, not for the email address! Wow, what a difficult problem email is these days. Time for can on a string?

A rapid move to universal DomainKeys (is that the best one?) on the net might be the best thing.

*Jeff* · 06-07-2008, 01:19 PM

That would seem to get around the cert error and be an interesting option. I don't think it would do much more than that though.

*Andilinks* · 06-07-2008, 02:17 PM

Quote:

Time for can on a string?

I think a lot of private networks have long been using pw protected HTTP or FTP. I do know that if I ran an organization that's what I would use for internal and private communication. Please enlighten me if there is a better protocol.

Even so, an STMP account is still needed.

*kitchin* · 06-07-2008, 06:00 PM

Jeff I thought maybe it would make the RBL / undocumented blocking situation more controllable. Yeah, and I forgot GMail was having its own probs!

By the way, here is the kind of message I have been cornered into writing to customers:

Quote:

Hi ____, I do not have any other options for your email, besides web mail or Outlook or Thunderbird or Apple mail or whatever. I cannot forward it to another email address. Cannot be done. Will be tagged as spam.

I'll probably end up shedding my hosting-only customers and send them to certain all-in-one provider and wash my hands of it, with some guilt. I am spending a lot of time fielding request from people who want email to work like any sane person would think it does, and I guess the big providers are better at offering some glam semi-solution... with lots of buttons and pictures of people answering an 800 number. That ain't me. Problem is, those big all-in-one glam providers will close your account for same things FQ would (sending spam, or appearing to), but much more opaquely, without warnings or explanations, and lock up your domain too. Or so I've read.

Really there is no answer, but if FQ wants to do something to handle this, I would be glad to give them the accounts.

*Jeff* · 06-09-2008, 10:15 AM

I ran across this concept and thought it was somewhat related to this thread:
http://forums.theplanet.com/index.ph...0&#entry595389

(in theory, not so much in practice since we're talking about exim vs. qmail, one-client dedicated server vs. shared hosting email cluster, and yahoo and hotmail don't offer direct pop/smtp/imap access as far as I know, though I bet we'll see something for mobile devices soon (maybe it's here already?)

In another thread I believe it was wasser who brought up the idea that soon a business would have to maintain yahoo, hotmail, etc. accounts for mailing people with those services which seemed to me like a huge burden to maintain this decentralized mail account grouping.

But maybe the next trick we'll see (hearkening back to the semi-open, semi-self contained AOL a decade ago) would be an "automatic manual" smtp server where each client could specify an actual account at a given major provider. If gmail account specified and is to @gmail.com, run script to actually login to gmail via username/password for gmail to gmail deliver. If hotmail account specified and is to @hotmail.com address, run script to login to hotmail for hotmail to hotmail delivery. If yahoo... etc., etc. If none of the above, proceed with normal Internet delivery.

Maybe a wild idea to actually have to have an account with each major provider to get past their great wall (internet spam firewall) and in through each provider's customer gate, but interesting that some are already doing this.

*Randall* · 06-09-2008, 03:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeff

Maybe a wild idea to actually have to have an account with each major provider to get past their great wall (internet spam firewall) and in through each provider's customer gate, but interesting that some are already doing this.

An interesting approach -- probably something home users wouldn't bother with, but useful for businesses.

But before something like this can happen, they have to tighten security on new accounts ... if the spammers have free reign at Gmail already, authenticated SMTP isn't even going to slow them down.

Spam sucks.

Randall