Help with Email Error Msg and Venting about Mail Hosts

[phuschnickens]

I'm taking suggestions for email hosting companies. The best one we've ever had is Sarcnet (ie. primesuspect), but then he closed the doors and sold us off to some moron that never answered his phone... so he lost our business. Then, three weeks ago we switched to Godaddy. Never had so many problems with any type of service in my life... and no attempt by their team to remedy the problems or even admit responsibility.

I would love to see a lot of people chime in on this and start a list.

Thanks guys!

[kryyst]

Why not use gmail? You can use their professional services and maintain your @domain name still.

[phuschnickens]

Why not use gmail? You can use their professional services and maintain your @domain name still.

Word? and compatible with outlook?

Edit: What I said is misleading.. I meant "Oh really? And is it compatible with Microsoft Outlook?"

[Snarkasm]

It has POP3 and IMAP functionality, so you can download and manage email with any compatible mail client.

[phuschnickens]

Whoa. am i missing something or is it really $50/user/year... we need 16 mailboxes but cannot justify spending $800/yr on email.

Any other ideas?

[primesuspect]

gmail imap/pop3 is free. You're missing something.

Here's the thing: I use gmail as free pop3 hosting for a variety of domains, but I am not at all happy with the outlook performance of imap. Outlook is VERY slow with gmail.

It's probably not a great solution for srs bzns. But it is reliable, and it's free.

[phuschnickens]

I was looking at google email professional services.

I'm really looking for something that will "just work" 99.7% of the time. It sounds like gmail might not be that something.

If only prime still had a hosting company...

Anyway, i'm seriously pushed to the point of feeling like hosting my own god damn email (even though I don't know how to)... or maybe even buying a penguin and when someone wants to send an email, i'll just write down the message on a napkin, tie it to the penguin's foot and tell him to waddle to the appropriate destination. It might be more effective.

What about...?

justhost
hostmonster
fatcow
inmotion hosting
bluehost
startlogic
hostgator
1and1

[Kwitko]

Any possibility of running your own server?

[phuschnickens]

Any possibility of running your own server?

Anyway, i'm seriously pushed to the point of feeling like hosting my own god damn email (even though I don't know how to)...

Yes, I mean... we have a T1 with some kind of decent upspeed (and more importantly we have really low requirements... 6 mailboxes that are truly "taxed" ever and some other boxes that are just kind of there.

I'm thinking about a linux server but I really don't have very much Linux experience. I guess I could probably figure it out anyway though.

[kryyst]

To host your own reliable email server you need....
a static ip
a domain name that you can control
mx records linking your domain name to your ip
an email server

If your hosting your own email then I'd suggest running it on a stand alone server. You also will need it accessible to the outside world which means a good firewall. It's also recomended to having it sit in it's on DMZ.

If you want to run your own full featured email server I suggest checking out Scalix or Zimbra they are excellent packages. They are full featured email servers that run on linux. Both have free versions. They are similar in features to exchange so they would allow you for growth in your company.

[phuschnickens]

To host your own reliable email server you need....
a static ip
a domain name that you can control
mx records linking your domain name to your ip
an email server


We've got all of the above (except of course the email server). I'll take Scalix and Zimbra under consideration but what's wrong with postfix and courier on ubuntu? We are a VERY small company and pretty simple... Unless of course Scalix and Zimbra make setup easier.

As for firewall we've already got a smoothwall setup... so I'd just an another NIC for Orange (orange is dmz)...

[Kwitko]

Go with a turnkey solution like ClarkConnect. If you've got 10 or fewer mailboxes, it's free. CC will run POP3 or IMAP. Or you could always follow the myriad "roll-your-own" guides.

[kryyst]

We've got all of the above (except of course the email server). I'll take Scalix and Zimbra under consideration but what's wrong with postfix and courier on ubuntu? We are a VERY small company and pretty simple... Unless of course Scalix and Zimbra make setup easier.

As for firewall we've already got a smoothwall setup... so I'd just an another NIC for Orange (orange is dmz)...

There's nothing wrong with using postfix and courier, though I personally prefer postfix + dovecot for simple mail transport have spamassassin tied into that and it's pretty solid.

However there are lots of fiddly things you need to do to get an email server running if you are building it from scratch. Plus you said you really don't know much about linux so that's a hurdle in itself that you'd have to overcome.

If you use scalix or zumbra it's a drop in system that takes care of the work for you. But even then you'll probably need to give them a couple of tries before you understand all the setup stuff.

[phuschnickens]

Well, as a follow up, i'm proud to announce that, as a complete noob, I've managed to get a web, dns, and email server fully up and running. I used ubuntu 8.04 with apache2, bind9, postfix, dovecot and spamassassin. I've also got webmin and roundcube running for administration and for webmail. CRAZY!! I never thought I'd be able to pull it off this quickly.

[kryyst]

Nice. That's pretty much the same setup I use for a boxed web server. Did you have any issues getting spam assassin working with postfix/dovecot? Sometimes it works flawlessly for me. Other times it's a universal pain in the butt. Oh also you may want to throw clamav onto that machine as well. Then you can scan any emails for viruses as well.

[phuschnickens]

Nice. That's pretty much the same setup I use for a boxed web server. Did you have any issues getting spam assassin working with postfix/dovecot? Sometimes it works flawlessly for me. Other times it's a universal pain in the butt. Oh also you may want to throw clamav onto that machine as well. Then you can scan any emails for viruses as well.

As far as spamassassin goes, i think i had trouble configuring procmail correctly, but it's tough remembering because i've struggled with a lot of this stuff. Before I started this thread, March 6th, I had probably about 30 minutes of linux command line experience. I'm currently struggling to figure out the least insecure method of granting read/write access to a user for /var/www/ via ftp. ClamAV is on my list, i figured that's something I could do last, but the system's not even fully online yet (just have test domains setup not my company's domains).

[kryyst]

Well the issue is as soon as you allow ftp access to a folder then your security is only as good as the username/password rules you setup. You may also want to create a different ftp folder outside of the /var/www unless they specifically need access to that folder.

[phuschnickens]

Well the issue is as soon as you allow ftp access to a folder then your security is only as good as the username/password rules you setup. You may also want to create a different ftp folder outside of the /var/www unless they specifically need access to that folder.

Right, I think i'm just going to lock out all ftp access considering the fact that I am the one and only admin for all of the activity on the server. I can get files to and from the /var/www/ with other magical methods that don't turn my server into a public share.

Is there anything else I might need to know about security? Once I have it all tweaked correctly are there some functions I should disable to limit hacking attempts? I've got it behind a smoothwall firewall but configured so that's it's on a different subnet from the LAN and cannot access the LAN. I've only opened the neccessary ports, but there are a number of them.

[Leonardo]

as a complete noob, I've managed to get a web, dns, and email server fully up and running. I used ubuntu 8.04 with apache2, bind9, postfix, dovecot and spamassassinI'm impressed! :respect:

[Shorty]

If you want a mechanism to assure mail delivery, setup a backup MX record with a 3rd party as a store & forward host.

[kryyst]

Right, I think i'm just going to lock out all ftp access considering the fact that I am the one and only admin for all of the activity on the server. I can get files to and from the /var/www/ with other magical methods that don't turn my server into a public share.

You could setup putty access for yourself and access it that way or you can also set it up to enable webmin to be accessed remotely and work on your computer that way as well. You could further (if you want others to be able to access it) create webmin users accounts that they could connect to.


Is there anything else I might need to know about security? Once I have it all tweaked correctly are there some functions I should disable to limit hacking attempts? I've got it behind a smoothwall firewall but configured so that's it's on a different subnet from the LAN and cannot access the LAN. I've only opened the neccessary ports, but there are a number of them.

There is always more you can do to disable non-critical services and strip down the system to server only mode. But it's hard to say exactly what you need to do because it's kinda vague. For your did you go the ssl-route with your certs and all that?