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The nice thing with email is that it is many layers and you can decide what you do yourself and what not.

So here is what I did. The companies names are the ones I use. There will be others that do the same or more.
1) Have a domain (12 EUR per year) 15 EUR per year Includes 2 email adresses
2) DNS service. I use one that is free. Points the MX records to my web provider.
3) Webhosting for 25 EUR per year. (Do not think they sell that type) with unlimted emails and email aliasses.
4) Fetchmail, to get the email. Free.
5) Imap web server Free.

So there are 5 things. You actually only need one. That is the first one. So you are done for 15EUR per year. If you need webhosting, have that instead. Just see that the domain is in your name when it is free, not theirs. Again 15 EUR per year total.

Most will have some sore of webmail and/or IMAP or SMTP service that you can use.
You can even do it step by step. Just start with the domain (with free email) and then go from there as you feel comfortable or have time. You can even see to it that you give it to Google to read, if that is OK for you.

The reason I use my own mailserver (not that hard to install, if you are able to follow basic steps you find online) is that almost all mail services are blocked where I work. They block on domain name (I know.) and mine is not in any filter. If they do, adding a subdomain would be trivial.

Oh, you do need SSL if you have your own server https://certbot.eff.org/ to the resque.

So for 15 EUR per year I would just jump in. Hold on to your old address for at least a year just to be sure. The worst that could happen is that you wasted 15 EUR (or less) and learned nothing. Besat would be that you nbow have your own domain that you can use and abuse with email, website, linking to home (dynamic DNS might be needed. Zoneedit has this and is free.) and that you learned a lot about things along the way.

As an added bonus of unlimited aliasses, I now use a different email for different companies. e.g. slashdot.org@example.com here. So that way I know if something strange goes on. An email from my bank to a differnt address? Spam! A mail to my bank address and not from my bank. Breach at the bank or sold email!
Easy to filter on top of whatever filters I deside to use.

Main thing: See that the domain is actually on your name before you hand it out. That way you can transfer it to anywhere away from the DNS company, if you so desire. That is also the reason I use zoneedit. That way my provider can never hold me hostage. I just point the DNS elsewhere and 48 hours later (at most) all will work at a new provider.

Been using https://www.zoneedit.com/ for years, although I'm on the cheaper end of the spectrum. Not sure how enterprise-y you need your DNS

A quick search reveals http://www.noip.com/, and I'm sure they'll be more. Anyway isn't this supposed to be a stopgap before IPV6 means we can all have permanent static IPS?!

I've been using ZoneEdit for a long time. They've changed their business model slightly. Don't know if they still offer as many free options any more, but they have been great for me for over 10 years now!

OK, I just checked out the IPs of google.de:

google.de has address 74.125.39.106
google.de has address 74.125.39.147
google.de has address 74.125.39.99
google.de has address 74.125.39.103
google.de has address 74.125.39.104
google.de has address 74.125.39.105
google.de mail is handled by 10 google.com.s9a1.psmtp.com.
google.de mail is handled by 10 google.com.s9a2.psmtp.com.
google.de mail is handled by 10 google.com.s9b1.psmtp.com.
google.de mail is handled by 10 google.com.s9b2.psmtp.com.

Do those IP addresses look familiar?
Well, OK, both are in Europe, so let's try google.com:

google.com has address 74.125.39.99
google.com has address 74.125.39.103
google.com has address 74.125.39.104
google.com has address 74.125.39.105
google.com has address 74.125.39.106
google.com has address 74.125.39.147
google.com mail is handled by 10 aspmx.l.google.com.
google.com mail is handled by 20 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
google.com mail is handled by 30 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
google.com mail is handled by 40 alt3.aspmx.l.google.com.
google.com mail is handled by 50 alt4.aspmx.l.google.com.

And google.com.au:

google.com.au has address 74.125.39.147
google.com.au has address 74.125.39.99
google.com.au has address 74.125.39.103
google.com.au has address 74.125.39.104
google.com.au has address 74.125.39.105
google.com.au has address 74.125.39.106
google.com.au mail is handled by 10 google.com.s9a1.psmtp.com.
google.com.au mail is handled by 10 google.com.s9a2.psmtp.com.
google.com.au mail is handled by 10 google.com.s9b1.psmtp.com.
google.com.au mail is handled by 10 google.com.s9b2.psmtp.com.

OK, so maybe it's just the local DNS (I don't know how one would get different DNS records from different countries, but then, I'm no DNS expert). Therefore let's try an online resolver:
It gives me:

google.com. A 74.125.127.147

Ah, indeed, another address! I didn't know that was possible.

But then, my main point still remains: The TLD tells you exactly nothing about where the server is located. Note that all of .com, .com.sa, .de, .com.au ended up at the same servers for my local lookups.

The ENUM proposal is essentially asking for DNS lookup as a public service run by government or other regulatory bodies. First of all, as you said, why don't we just use names? And second, I'm not sure we want public DNS run by government or regulatory bodies. We already have community-run free DNS service such as http://freedns.afraid.org/ or commercial free service like http://www.dyndns.com/ or http://www.zoneedit.com/. If you're worried that free services would go away, a lot of domain name registries are also offering DNS service at nominal fee, and they would be less likely to vanish. Several people can share the cost of a domain.

All people need to do is to find creative uses of domain names. I think this is the hard part.

And ZoneEdit is free for the first five domains. AFAIK, they're not doing IPv6 yet, though.

      --- Mr. DOS

Since there were several people asking about possible replacements for hosting a DNS zone for free, I thought I'd give a shoutout to zoneedit.com. They do managed DNS, but your first 5 zones are free. I know the website looks like a relic from the 90s, but I've been using them for years and years (hosting 2 domains) and have never had a single issue.

Oblig Disclosure: No relation to the company other than being a satisfied user.

Eh, this is relevant, not redundant. There are plenty of NSFW sites that could have been referenced in that post, so many people can't safely check for themselves where that IP goes.

http://www.zoneedit.com/lookup.html

You're welcome

Yes, and for $10 annually, you can setup a DNS round-robin, so that if one of the servers doesn't respond by delivering the precise web page as expected by zoneedit, zoneedit removes that particular server from the DNS pool until it works as-expected.

http://www.zoneedit.com/

I'm sure other firms can do this also; and I'd like to know who they are. For the functionality, given cheap hosting and a little rsync love, this affords Cheap Redundancy.

I've been using ZoneEdit for years and they're great. Free for small domains, and really cheap for huge domains. It never, ever breaks. And it's super easy to work with.

http://www.zoneedit.com/

I was using them for free DNS service anyway, and they recently added domain registration so I figured I'd switch to them.

http://www.network-tools.com/
http://www.bankes.com/nslookup.htm
http://www.zoneedit.com/lookup.html

Type in a name (say, whitehouse.com) and they magically retrieve an IP (in this case 66.129.115.23). Neat, eh?

These were all in the first five Google results for "DNS lookup," which isn't that hard a phrase to remember, even if you don't know what it means. I have seen middle-schoolers use SOCKS and CGI proxies to bypass filters on MySpace; you are gravely mistaken if you think they're not capable of something as trivial as performing manual lookups of a few well-known domain names.

There is your free lesson in redundancy

XXXOOO ;)

Here's the WHOIS contact info for RFJason.com.

Jason Fortuny
726 Kirkland Cir
Apt C203
Kirkland, WA
98033, US
(425)576-5417
(425)576-5417

And here's the Google cache of his resume.

http://72.14.221.104/search?q=cache:CyJYkRHOYNIJ:p ersonal.rfjason.com/resume%3Fpage%3Dresumecomplete +RFJason+testimonials&hl=en&gl=ca&ct=clnk&cd=3

Guess editing your Livejournal isn't quite as effective at hiding your own personal details as you'd hoped, huh?

I also see someone has had the forethought to register JasonFortuny.com today. Good hunting to you, sir!

http://www.zoneedit.com/whois.html?zone=JasonFortu ny.com

We are in the similar situation having Exchange in-house behind a (quite stable) DSL line. Thankfully the DSL has been out only about 30 minutes total in our first year, but unfortunately our Exchange server can't say the same. We've gotten an amazing value using a backup mx service, which silently queues mail for us until our server returns. It works amazingly well-- once our server is back up, the queued mail comes flowing in. Its a beautiful thing.

We specifically use EasyDNS's DNS service which includes the backup MX service. We use their DNS Plus service which only costs about $40/year, and allows us to use their CLUSTER of backup MX servers (How cool is that!?)! Its also available on their DNS-only service (~$20/yr). I don't work for EasyDNS (just a happy customer). You can also get the same service from lots of other places as well.

Realistically, I think you need to use an external DNS service to do this for network outages (since other mail servers will need access to your domain's MX records to find to the backup MX servers). For us, this meant we needed to use a different DNS server inside our local network. The external dns points people to our mail server's public IP. The internal dns points to our internal ips.

Another note, we use PFSense as our firewall (great product!). Recently, I think I saw support for NAT Reflection was added (allowing internal machines to contact internal servers using a public IP address), which might negate the need for the "split" dns described above. Haven't tried that yet, though.

+OK 891 octets
Return-Path: spamvic@0451.com
Received: from admin-fd611d5fa (unknown [202.138.168.92])
    by mx2.hotpop.com (Postfix) with ESMTP
    id 16BCB39234E0; Wed, 12 Jul 2006 13:30:11 +0000 (UTC)
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2006 05:25:31 +0480
From: "Russell Ayers" spamvic2@0451.com
X-Mailer: The Bat! (v3.0.0.15) Educational
Reply-To: "Russell Ayers" spamvic2@0451.com
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
Message-ID: 589298365.20060713052531@0451.com
To: spamvic@hotpop.com
Subject: (CF13-SMTP [SpamByte=000:]) 1YR
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-HotPOP-Delivered-To: iamcf13@hotpop.com
X-MTA: CF13-SMTP(TM) / CF13-POP3(TM) http://www.cf13.com/
X-CF13-SMTP-ID-Message: 20060712121326.CF13-POP3@254.168.168.192.in-addr.a rpa
 
    He didn't answer. The water was making a lot of noise.
demonstrating love was to give something of the truth that he had seen to
returned my pass, and said without any of the niceties:
pure Outlaw, if that's the way they want it. And I'll make them so
.

I get my MX from zoneedit for which I made a nominal one-time payment and I you can get 1GB from Yahoo for free. Zoneedit forward an unlimited number of email addresses to as many email accounts, on different servers, as you want. The market is full of niches for people with slightly varying requirements - I actually prefer to pay Apple to deliver my email. I don't see anything special about the gmail niche that makes it stand out from the others except for the obvious privacy concerns with gmail.

use zoneedit for all of your (free) dns needs. Then find free webhosting from a place like funpic (no ads and only limit is ind. file size = 1MB) and you've got a hosted website for $8.95/yr.

Has anyone done any measurement stats on DNS queries

According to my DNS hosting company's FAQ:

"...or 200MB of usage is used (1 million DNS queries)"

Extra spam account? pshhhh. who needs them?

I bought a domain name and set it up in ZoneEdit with mail forwarding (*@somedomain.com forwards to you). Then, for instance, you want to sign up for free ipods, you sign up with the email freeipod@somedomain.com.

When you get your free ipod, you just set up an email alias for freeipod@somedomain.com to point to webmaster@freeipods.com, or something similar, and yer done.

best trick ever.

I accomplish this somewhat, but it doesn't work in the webmail interface.

first, i went to zoneedit.com and set up my account so my domain uses their nameservers. then i configured a lot else, but what's relevant here is their mailforwards. I set up one private and one catchall address to send to my private and spamdump gmail addresses, respectively.

The biggest lacking is that you'll need your own SMTP server, as using gmail's will force the return address to be your gmail address, whereas you'll want to use your domain's. I set up my own SMTP with a login/password to forward to my isp's smtp server.

so in my normal mail client, i DO use my own domain address for email, but it all just forwards to gmail. when i need to, i can use the web-interface if i don't care that the recipient will see my gmail return addy. either one goes to the same place.

If you have a good, reliable broadband connection from an ISP like Speakeasy, then you can probably set up a small server and handle your own e-mail and hosting. So long as you don't need rocket science, you'll get really good results. You just need to have an ISP that gives you a static IP (ideally) and has an AUP that allows you to run servers.

If you do that, then good options for the hosting OS itself would be either the SME Server (from http://www.contribs.org/), or the new version of Clark Connect that just came out this week (http://www.clarkconnect.com/ - I use the commercial version for my home server). If you're not serving up tons of dynamic content a fairly small PC and relatively low-bandwidth DSL line will give you really good results. I also use ZoneEdit for my DNS and backup MX service - that way with backup MX even if I'm down for a while I won't miss any mail and I'll just get it despooled when I come back up.

Another option potentially would be to use a Mac Mini with the 10-user version of MacOS X Server - that'd give you a nice turnkey server for about $1k. But it won't give you spam controls, which both the Linux distros I mentioned above will do. And day-to-day admin of both SME and ClarkConnect are real easy - in fact, ClarkConnect will take care of automatically providing all your updates when you buy the commercial (and cheap) version. They'll also do e-mail antivirus and give you what ZoneEdit offers as an ASP service - though it's not cheap.

The key is to read the SMTP headers and the underlying HTML (if any).

The phishers/extortionists are counting on people not being savvy enough to do that--thus, they 'win'.

LostCluster wants to scrap SMTP.

What other scheme with the reliability of SMTP is around now to take its place?

Then there is all the time, effort, and infrastructure invested in SMTP--no one is going to throw all that away if there isn't something better to take it's place.

All SMTP is is a transport medium--neither good nor evil.

The simple (but time consuming and resource draining) quick fix would be for all email to be publicly encrypted with public key cryptology [the Feds'll love that! >:) ]. Business sites publish their public key out in the open and use their private key to encrypt their email before sending it out. Authenticity problem solved except for two problems:

1) The bad guys correctly guess or generate the private key of bigsite.example.com This is laughably unlikely but possible which leads to the more likely possibility:

2) Someone at bigsite.example.com accidentally or deliberately divulges (under duress?) the secret key to the bad guys.

If 1 or 2 happens, the bad guys can now send email appearing to come from bigsite.example.com even though the email is transmitted from elbonia.example.com If TCP/IP spoofing or a compromised mailserver at bigsite.example.com is used, the desception apparently becomes perfect. Of course, should bigsite.example.com disavow their compromised key and issue a new one, everybody who does business with them have to change their keys and otherwise muck around with public key encryption which will be a stumbling block to the non-crypto savvy.

In the end I say, using crypto or replacing SMTP is not the answer. Just use a bit of detective work on the underlying SMTP headers and any imbeded HTML A HREF links to expose the fraud with the help of a whois service. If it still looks legitimate, you can:

1) Stop doing business with them.
2) Alert them to the situation so they can do something about it.
3) Contact the authorities and let them handle it.

What more can one do in this situation?

I recommend zoneedit to all my clients, since it offers full DNS functionality, as well as mail forwarding etc. You can easily turn any domain or sub domain into a dynamic domain, and their control panel is easy-as-pants to use.

ZoneEdit is great if you own your own domain. If it offers the full gambit of DNS services, from setting up a round-robim, editing your A, MX and CNAMES to setting up web and mail forwarding. Best part it's free - up to 5 domains if I remember correctly.
And if you ever find your own DNS, you can also let ZoneEdit act as a slave zone as well - I highly recommend it.

ZoneEdit has free dynamic DNS (for up to 5 domains).

Great thing is, it doesn't need a client. A simple wget works:

wget -O - --http-user=username --http-passwd=password 'http://dynamic.zoneedit.com/auth/dynamic.html?hos t=www.mydomain.com'

More details: http://www.zoneedit.com/doc/dynamic.html

I use it, it rocks
http://zoneedit.com/

I had a dynamic ip on a cable modem but for some reason my freebsd box that firewalled my lan never changed ip's. I was never brave enough to run apache, postfix and bind 9 on it so I let zoneedit do the dns for me. If your ip stays the same over a long period of time, that might be an option for you. Of course your mileage may vary your head my explode or the feds may bust down your door for breaking the acceptable use policy. Then again you probably already breaking the aup by running apache.

Before citing SPEWS as the savior of all things on the internet, it may be worthwile to note that SPEWS supporters themselves have participated in DDoS attacks. information here

I think dydndns sucks but that's just my opinion. Use something like ZoneEdit -- they allow you to add TXT records.

Zoneedit.com is also free* and allows you to create TXT records.

*There are limits to zoneedit's free-ness. Basically it's free for fewer than 5 domains and less than 200MB of traffic (200MB is highly unlikely for DNS) but read their policy for details.

I do this as well. I used to have an email address from MailBank (later changed to NetIdentity). They buy up domains with last names so you can do firstname@lastname.com. They started off charging $5 a year for email and now it's $25/year. I got fed up with it and bought my own domain name.

Best move I did. I have greater control over it and feel more security about it as well.

There is a free DNS service held by ZoneEdit. If you only use it for one domain, it allows free email forwards, web forwards, etc. It has about all the services I could ask for (except hosting) for free (assuming you don't go over a quota).

I have emails redirected to my gmail account as well as comcast (which also hosts my personal website). I could host this on my own computer or elsewhere and I have a lot of freedom to do what I want.

And as the parent said, being able to create email addresses on the fly allows you to catch businesses that sell your email address, or find out where the spammers mostly target (and as another poster said, Slashdot is worst of all the ones I've created). It also makes it easier to filter with gmail and do searches and so forth.

I know I'm being mostly redundant as others, but I can't emphasize enough how valuable this is, especially to a computer geek. And I'm only paying $7/year for all this! I can't mod the parent up any more so I just want to re-iterate the value of catchall addresses and owning your own domain name.

> good, cheap, and even free alternatives to hosting your own DNS

And just in case you are looking for a good, cheap, and even free alternative, check out ZoneEdit. Highly recommended.

Well, as if there isn't enough that has been already said about the questionable practices of SPEWS, but it seems like it bears repeating for this audience once again.

First off, they block entire ISP's instead of offending netblocks or IP addresses. This works nicely to "encourage" their customers to switch, thereby presuring the ISP to switch. However, in many areas, there is only one viable ISP for a type of service or area of service. These customers are forced to deal with SPEWS blocking with the few places that do use it. On top of that, is it reasonable to ask people to be blocked for weeks at a time because of a small spammer that you have nothing to do with who got out of control for a few days?

Another one of SPEWS' rather unfortunatnte polcies is their blocking of entire countries. I agree with SPEWS that some countries, namely many Asian and South American ones, have gotten very lax with spammers, however that is no justification to cut off an entire culture from everyone else at your own whim. Thats downright wrong and its racist.

As if that is bad enough, there is the story of when SPEWS came to head with a rather large website, Something Awful who it would cost alot of money to move their servers and data over to new people (and not to mention the increases in monthly cost it would incur to them that would probably shut them down or restrict them) in order to avoid being unfairly blacklisted by SPEWS' block on their ISP's IP range. This did not sit well with their users, who lodged a protest with SPEWS en masse. This resulted in a counter DDoS from SPEWS members, which is documented here and many other places. Do you want to support an organization that does this type of activity to people who disagree with them?

In my mind, SPEWS is no better than the spammers, and quite a few others agree with my sentiments.

Of course, most of the people using SPEWS don't ever have to receive emails of any importance from clients or customers. How would you explain to your customers that they have to switch ISP's to do business with you and expect to still have them as customers?

However, of the anti-spam groups, I happen to like SpamCop (there are other respectable ones, I just dont have any level of experience with them). They do a damned fine job of blocking spam very fast and would reccomend them in a heartbeat.

Yes pobox.com is a great service which I used for about five years and still recommend to friends but at the end of the day you're still dependent on them staying in business and not unreasonably raising prices etc

A .com domain registration including free email forwarding is only $7.95 per year now at GoDaddy. That's probably a better deal if you're about to go through the pain of changing addresses and you really want the confidence of being able to keep the address forever. If GoDaddy became a problem then you can always move the domain elsewhere.

I use zoneedit for my domain name. You can set up DNS, dynamic DNS on it or if you don't have the skill or the need, it also provides web and mail forwards. The best part is that unless you use some insane amount of their bandwidth, it's free.

Hey, remember the Canadian startup icravetv.com (archive link) and the fuss it stirred up. It was a good little service for its time, before getting squashed by legalities. Maybe it would be a good time for them to consider starting it up again.

There is already a cure for spam - give everyone unlimited email addresses, give out different addresses to different recipients, and delete any email that receives spam (along with possibly sending an email of complaint to whoever you originally have that particular address to). The whole thing could easily be built into mail clients and supported by mail providers. It works fine for me. It costs me $35 to buy my own domain and a one off payment of about $30 to zoneedit to set up the mail forwarding. It works so well, and has worked for the least 3 or 4 years, that I almost suspect that there is some kind of conspiracy to overlook this method in order to promote other dubious methods.

I think it has more to do with blocking servers and preventing people from using their home DSL account to host a Counterstrike server.

In my setup, I have a cron job on my Linux box which runs zoneclient every 10 minutes. Zoneclient queries my router for it's external IP address, and if it has changed since the last check, it tells my DNS provider to update the appropriate A records. 10 minutes is a pretty arbitrary number, it's good enough for my purposes. I could crank the cron job up to run 1/min without any trouble, but that seems like overkill to me, since I usually only wind up getting a new address once or twice a month. Dynamic DNS probably isn't good enough for a serious production server; but it's adequate for a private mail server, especially if you have an external store-and-forward backup server to hold your mail temporarily. For a game server used by you and your friends, this setup works perfectly.

I think it has more to do with blocking servers and preventing people from using their home DSL account to host a Counterstrike server.

In my setup, I have a cron job on my Linux box which runs zoneclient every 10 minutes. Zoneclient queries my router for it's external IP address, and if it has changed since the last check, it tells my DNS provider to update the appropriate A records. 10 minutes is a pretty arbitrary number, it's good enough for my purposes. I could crank the cron job up to run 1/min without any trouble, but that seems like overkill to me, since I usually only wind up getting a new address once or twice a month. Dynamic DNS probably isn't good enough for a serious production server; but it's adequate for a private mail server, especially if you have an external store-and-forward backup server to hold your mail temporarily. For a game server used by you and your friends, this setup works perfectly.

The free service (up to 5 domains) at ZoneEdit would be helpful in conjuction with this strategy. I've been using the service for a while now and though the site isn't much to look at, I've never had a DNS outage with them.

In Germany, one has to pay approx. 60 Euro/Month for an 768/128 ADSL connection with static IP. A perhaps typical setup there is:

• 20 Euro for T-DSL (german telecom)
• 30 Euro for unlimited traffic through an independent DSL-ISP (e.g. KAMP DSL)
• 10 Euro extra for static IP

This ISP doesn't block ports, has no objections of you operating your own servers, and is well-connected to major backbones.

Bigger ISPs are generally more reluctant to give you full access to their backbones, but smaller ISPs compete for customers and this is a very important point for many of them.

The biggest issue with this is T-DSL, which disconnects you every 24 hrs, so you have to immediately reconnect if you operate an HTTP, SMTP or DNS server over their link. Most ppp daemons or ppp routers will do this for you automatically. With a static IP, programs won't even notify the disconnect.

While it is trivial to operate your own domain(s) over an ADSL link, I wouldn't recommend it for more than just home usage purposes: You need to provide redundancy through alternative links, multiple servers (at least hot swappable), uninterruptible power supplies, RAID arrays, etc... You also need backup MXes and would need one or more external DNS servers, e.g. at zoneedit.com or dyndns.org. For a very small number of domains/users, this is too costly. You'd prefer to leverage economics of scale by renting a physical or virtual server in a well-connected data center. Of course, YMMV.

I run a Linux Virtual Private Server Hosting company.

I've been considering providing a domain name service. But I think its in people best interests to decouple their domain name from their hosting provider. Why?

You can probably get the domain cheaper from a domain name specialist. GoDaddy and the like.

Places like ZoneEdit offer an unbeatable, easy to use, reliable and free DNS service. Or you can just to it yourself on your VPS. You have root right?

If you need to move hosts then there is no third party (ex host) to get in the way. Even if they are a fair host, you still have issues over controlling the timing of any changes. With your own domain/DNS, you can time your switchover to the within a few minutes.

Finally, if you didn't get the domain name yourself to begin with, and if you are relying on your old webhost for the transfer, then just be persistent with them. If they treat you unfairly, tell the world or find if they are listed on a review site and provide (an accurate and fair, of course) review of what they did.

For example, when you visit ZoneEdit, a self-funded, but popular website, you get a link to UltraDNS - a well-funded, but less popular company.

Allowing advertising on competitor's sites is more than unfair, it's evil. Why would decent-seeming companies like Google and Amazon would associate themselves with Alexa?

Get your own domain ($35/year), get someone to forward mail to that domain (eg. these guys) and give everyone who needs your address a different one. If you receive spam you (1) know who sent it to you and (2) can delete it.

I've only dealt with this problem on personal sites, but I'd recommend outsourcing DNS for at least a few weeks before and after your move.

I've been real happy with zoneedit for DNS services. In fact, from looking at the identical sign-up forms on the Verisign and Zoneedit websites, I think Verisign is reselling their services (not that what those guys do should necessarily be an inspiration to anyone).

This might help to eliminate one very hairy variable from your already complex equation.

Sorry for the slightly off-topic posts...

I have become frustrated with my current domain/dns situation and need something new. What I would really like is domain name registration and DNS hosting for <= $15/year. Something reliable would be nice.

Any suggestions in general or comments on, pairNIC.com, ZoneEdit.com, MyDomain.com, or EveryDNS.net?

I use Zone Edit to deal with DHCP with DSL. Not a good solution for the poster of the article because the bandwidth is certainly limited (especially up-speed) but it is a great free service for small web sites. Although, I am sure DSL providers would frown on a customer serving porn.

I highly recommend Zone Edit. Nice web interface to change anything you want, and you can update the dns when it changes by having a wget command in your ip-up.local (I'm on DSL) or in a cron or something. Plus the first 5 domains are free. Otherwise $11/year or something like that. Unlimited sub-domains etc. Check it out for yourself.

This is SBC Ameritech's pricing. I have their "Speedpath 768" home user program. 768 down/128 up, dynamic IP. They have the same rates with 5 static IPs for $65. However they also have 1500 down / 256 up with dynamic IP for $60. This is what I'm planning on moving to. This is a helluva deal if you can get it. I use Zone Edit, so dynamic DNS is no problem.

Yes Ameritech's customer service is horrible, but I don't have even have a cable modem alternative, and the local ISPs are a joke. However my DSL has been pretty reliable.

Incidentally, you can buy domain-based E-mail redirection [dnscentral.com] for about $20 per year. So you can buy your own domain (maybe in .nom) just for forwarding purposes.

This is a good idea. But you can do it cheaper, with extremely reliable providers. You can get MX records or full forwarding for free from ZoneEdit. And you can get a domain for just $9 from GoDaddy. And you can forward it to account which you can access using IMAP with any mail client, or using the web, by using FastMail.FM.

This setup is that currently recommended by most of the community at http://www.emaildiscussions.com, which is the best place to find out about effective use of email.

Of course, if you have a static IP (and your ISP doesn't block incoming port 25 requests) you could also set up your own mailserver and create a MX record for it. ZoneEdit also offers (for $11/year) a backup store-and-forward mailserver in case your connection goes down. Since you own the domain, you can create as many email addresses as you want -- you can easily provide addresses for your family and friends.

There's really no excuse to whine about losing email addresses, when it's so cheap and easy to provide them for yourself.