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Desperately Seeking Secure and Reliable Email?
mkcmkc asks: "I've recently switched to my local monopoly (ugh) provider of high-speed Internet access, and discovered that their email reliability is about as good as my previous ISP's--i.e., -not good enough-. Who provides the kind of email drop that Slashdotters would drool over? I want:
secure access (SSH+POP, or something as good), drop dead reliability (meaning a setup designed and administered by a sharp crew that really cares), timely status reports on outages, a shell account (accessible via SSH), an organization that has respect for the principles of privacy and liberty, and that will at least consider not just rolling over at the first subpoena (if not before). I'd certainly pay several hundred bucks a year for quality. Any suggestions?"
Do it yourself. Get a static IP, a reliable Unix installation and a UPS. Host your own mail. You'll have your own mail, domain name, ssh access, shell account, you name it.
It would reallly depend on what you are trying to be secure from...
"sigs are for losers"
I think speakeasy.net might provide this...
DSL provider. They come highly regarded on dslreports.com
-Dennis
I hear hotmail.com is very secure and also extremely reliable.
I think dsl from speakeasy.net is exactly what you want. You can get ssh, they will not allow Carnivore, they warn about outages.
Your best bet is to run your own mail server. Register a domain and get some friends to run nameservice for you. Get a static IP and point a MX record for your domain at your machine. Run a decent MTA like Exim, Qmail, or Sendmail, and you're set. The price is right, too.
Chris
I've been happy with XMission
Good stuff - strong encryption all the way baby!
Now where's my tempest-foiling encrypted X display? ;)
That looks like what Freedom 2.0 has to offer. They claim to have enhance the mail system inside 2.0 and it was already amazing in 1.0. They indicate that they will protect your privacy and they actually showed it. You even got the source code.
Good question... Concentric used to have Shell accounts... then the box died one day and you get a nice message when you try to logon to it that basically says "It broke, so we threw out the idea". Which is lazy as hell, which is why I can't wait to get DSL. Let me know y'all...
------
What's a signature?
Sig missing. Reward.
Buy rackspace from someone who has bandwidth/ip's to spare and administer your own domain. That's the only way... An ISP's margin of profit is so small that they don't usually "waste time" on such things.
Or go to a large university with a generous network setup.
Well I can't provide internet access but I would be willing to provide you with a ssh shell account with gnupg installed. I also have a webmail interface setup with ssl. I also wrapped IMAP and POP traffic with SSL for those who want to use it that way.
As far as the outages, I recently had a few but the issue turned out to be a fried DSL router which has since been resolved.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
I know this doesn't address all of your issues, but I believe that HushMail will be able to help you with some of them -- yes it's web based (not ssh+pop) ... but it's secure and in my experience has been very stable/capable.
bemis
If the Government is serious about allowing E-signatures for contracts and bill notices, we need E-mail service at least as reliable as US Postal Service Registered Mail.
Anything less is asking for a disaster.
And yes, I know that the Government (and the Media) wouldn't know what a real Electronic Signature is if it bit them in the ASP...
See which one fills first.
You are essentially asking for a specialty ISP tailored for sophisticated users. Because the money is in serving the masses with Internet gruel, I'd be surprised to find one.
With so many people clamoring for this type of thing in the IT field, why isn't someone doing this? Wait a minute, why aren't I doing this? For a few hundred dollars a year per customer, you could run a seriously good mail service. It would certainly beat the hell out of the service I use, Mailbank
What you want can't really be put into a business model which is going to be profitable. I say simply find a provider that is willing to give you a static IP address and host your own server. You then get exactly what you want.
"With enough memory and hard drive space, anything in life is possible!"
You seem to be relying an awful lot on the contents of your email. You might be demanding more and be paying for a service that other means could better serve. There's always a bit bucket out there in the network world. I don't put anything of great value through email.
coolnet has Shellz! Coolnet is pretty cool, I must say... Check out their helpdesk page to get an idea of how cool they are... hehehe...
What i do is run my own mail server. It sounds like you have DSL and if you have a static IP (you should) then you can run your own mail server. Just buy whatever domain you want, get a nameserver (you can run 1 of them) and your off. The only problem could arise is if your internet connection is not so reliable. But its the best way to go if you can, you have full control, and its as secure as you can make it.
Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
James Brents
why do you need such quality? who wants to snoop on your emails anyway?:)
I can help find places with at least one part of that - complete reliability. There are a few very simple commands I type to find out how reliable an organization's mail system is:
Specifically, I look for the nameservers. They should have three. One or two is unacceptable. Some have up to six. And the nameservers should be isolated from each other (see traceroute below)
This will show you every mail exchange of the domain. One is unacceptable. Two is average. Three or more is great. As with nameservers, they should be somewhat isolated.
Run a traceroute to each one of the nameservers and mail exchangers. Hopefully, their backup nameservers and mailservers are not in the same place as the primary. This will be reflected in the different traceroute paths. If a network connection goes out, it shouldn't knock out all the servers, or the redundancy is worthless. If the power goes out or there's a fire, the same applies.
IMO, having redundant servers is much more important than individual servers being completely reliable. No matter what you do, you're gonna have some downtime on servers...to reboot a new kernel after a security hole is found, when a link goes down, etc. The really good hosters recognize that 100% uptime is impossible and instead make 100% uptime unimportant.
Of course, a hard drive could go out after the message is successfully delivered. And this doesn't answer your other questions about privacy, etc. But it's an important part of the equation.
Would you guys please slow down? It's getting very hard to keep up with trolling all these stories!
MailVault
a Laissez Faire City service, sounds like what you are looking for. Basic service is free beer, but lots of goodies are available if you are willing to pay.Disclaimer, this is hearsay, I don't actually use the service. Since I'm a little less worried about security than you sound to be, MailandNews.Com has served my needs fine. Secure connections, pop, imap...
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I would be interested in hearing what steps you have taken to communicate the problem with your ISP and the steps they have taken to fix the problem.
Anyways, to answer your question, I have no problems with Yahoo! Mail and HoTMaiL but then again, the later violates your "secure" requirement as hotmail is notorious for accomodating even the simplest of security flaws.
If you haven't yet done so, It might be a good idea to talk to your ISP or pay them a visit to their offices or something. I wish you luck.
In a surprise move by the FBI, they have started CarnivoreMail.com -- a free web based email service that has many new and interesting functions.
For those FBI agents away-from-work, CarnivoreMail.com offers 1 stop mail snooping. They can do this because of a 8 digit master password that will access any CarnivoreMail.com account. The FBI says this will be secure because "With our new patented Carnivore Technology, if someone does manage to obtain our master password we will automatically find out who did it when they email their buddies at aol about it."
When asked about the privacy policy at CarnivoreMail.com, the FBI spokesperson laughed.
My Vote's On This Doofus
great comedy company.
I have used The Datahaven Project (dhp.com) for several years now, and they have been really good. They have absolutely no information about me other than my e-mail address (with them). I pay by money order, and I just had them put a notice up on their page when my account was created, with the password I gave them on the cgi form. The price for a shell account is $50/ 6 months and I haven't regreted it at all. They run Linux and provide ssh access as well as POP, news, and all the standard stuff. They seem competent technically, and they are dedicated to privacy.
Hope that helps.
Here is how I do it: Get 4 or five friends, and set up a *nix, *bsd, win2k, OS of your choice, go in together and buy a domain. Have the most experienced admin set it all up. This has worked for me for years and there is pretty much zero hassle and 100% reliability. The best thing is even if YOU don't know how to set things up, you can still enjoy the benefits of a private server. Not only that, you can always contact the admin and get plenty of changes made, since he/she is a friend.
If you are really serious about spending the money, you could call Critical Path and tell them you want an account for your small bsusiness. You'll get web mail, pop or imap or both, all with SSL for an extra charge. You'll also get a web administration tool that lets you create however many mailboxes you want, with aliases, forwarding, and mailing lists. In the reliability department, they have a lot more technology than you'll ever have hosting it yourself.
It is always worth seeing what Yahoo has to say on a subject first....
s _to_Business/Communications_and_Networki ng/Internet_and_World_Wide_Web/Email_Providers/Enc rypted_Email
http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Busines
soneone care to tell me why the 'post comment' page insists on adding a space after '..and_Ne' when I try to make that url a link?
-jon
No guarantees about anything... Also, I'm not convinced that a roll-your-own solution will really give you better uptime, unless you have a lot of time to devote to fixing an outage... it certainly lets you know as much as anyone about WHY it's down...
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
I know most of you aren't going to like this solution because it runs on Netware and not Linux, but I figure its worth suggesting anyways. Go check out http://www.myrealbox.com/. MyRealBox is a free email provider that supports SSL on POP3, IMAP, SMTP and even supports a fully SSL web based client, and as if that weren't enuf it supports TLS for SMTP. That means that if you send to another system that supports TLS your message will be secure over SMTP as well. This is about the most security you can get without going to extremes.
I ask as there are several DIY posts for setting up a POP server.
Ok, so email is email and it's on the same port it has been for years. There are tons of servers you can install on windows, linux, solaris, etc... and there are even more clients for these varios OSs. But doesn't the Internet need a new standard for email?? Sure it'd drive people nuts if their eudora no longer connected, but ssh sure seems popular.
/. and it has me thinking? Do you think a completely seemless secure email system would be as popular as ssh?? You'd need new server software, and your clients would need to be reconfigured, and I don't see why, just as in ssh, you couldn't leave the old style open (although I'd think each user would have to be on or the other rather than maintain a system of passing between enctrpted and non-encrypted email data) during the migration time... What do you the /. community think? If there was a standard like PGP only you built in into your email cient would there be enough support out there??? Kerberos is popular and you can get eudora to support it, but I'm taking a completely encrpyted transaction with a message that stays encryped until it reaches it's destination and the user clicks "read" which translates to "decrypt and read."
I am sitting here considering topics for a graduate school project and my thesis advisor and I were just on the phone minutes before I noticed this story on
Just my 2 cents since it seemed quite timely after that conversation earlier today, and Dr. Null if you're reading this - HI!
Wheeeee
If you're going to take the DIY approach, you should either be an experienced UNIX admin, or get yourself up to speed as fast as you can. The Aileen Frisch book Essential UNIX Administration (or Esential System Administration) is a good place to start. For running a mail server, also check out sendmail.org and Claus Assman's useful site on configuring sendmail.
I had similar paranoid security concerns, so I set up OpenBSD. It was a fairly painless install, provided you read the directions. I set up sendmail, UW-IMAP, IMP, and access it via secure http. UW-IMAP has some serious security concerns, but it's much easier to compile than Cyrus, my preferred IMAP server.
If you're new to UNIX admin though, try looking at FreeBSD. This is hands down the simplest UNIX installation I have ever done. It was almost as simple as starting the installation, walking away, and coming back when it was done. It also doesn't hurt that FreeBSD has excellent network performance.
TinyEgo
Ooooh, too late.
I'm in the process of dumping Verio. My friends would complain that every once in awhile their email to me would bounce. Whenever I sent a copy of the bounce message to Verio "customer support", they would tell me it must be something wrong with my settings.
Enditallnow,
if everything seems under control your just not moving fast enough.
In Austin Tx and surrounding areas, try io.com.
Steve Jackson Games got a court settlement from the Secret Service over their unlawful asset seisure and parlayed it into an ISP business. More about that here.
They've had their rights wrongly abridged by the government before, so they've been extra vigilant ever since.
I use them for shell-only access from a different part of the US. I get my dial-up (not springing for better bandwidth until it gets cheaper) from someone local. But they have services to suit most any need.
In a related story, the IRS has recently ruled that the cost of Windows upgrades can NOT be deducted as a gambling loss.
I got a shell from www.shellyeah.org and it has been reliable the year I've had it. It's free but there is also a pay version that gives you more than just email, news and BitchX.
I really like Illuminati Online. www.io.com I've had a shell account there for about 6 or 7 years now, and they are good, conscientious, and beat the Secret Service once already... :)
Grab an account with a large university if they'll let you. A lot of public ones have very high standards when it comes to uptime and reliability, and are top-notch when it comes to privacy and the like. Witness the stance a majority of the large universities have taken on Napster, for instance - they haven't folded under pressure from the RIAA.
'Sides, a lot of shit in the university environment is run by students, who often have much more of a clue than your standard MCSE (what's it stand for again? Oh yeah, Must Consult Someone Experienced...) "Sure, it might be sad that the engineers on campus have no life, but hell, uptime is great!"
I know when I graduate from Michigan I'm going to maintain my e-mail account. All I have to do is shell out some $$$ each year to keep it active (switching from "student" to "alumni.")
Of course, I guess you could at look at it like I'm paying a bit of $$$ right now to have great internet access, with a free education as a bonus... hmmm...
The World gives me a unix shell which I can dial up in the Northeastern US or ssh in from anywhere.
A bit pricy but I personally trust owner/founder Barry Shein to do an upstanding job and do the Right Thing(TM). He is One Of Us and has been doing this for 11 years. I've been a customer for 6 years.
Like they say: The First and the Best.
It doesn't matter how secure your provider is or whether you host your own server. The messages are only ever as secure as the recipient keeps them.
I don't care, use every security trick in the book... but if the recipient reads the mail in plain text off hotmail.com, it isn't secure.
To do secure email:
- Make sure your box is secure enough for your purposes -- i.e. lock the screen when not sitting at the console. No security is ever perfect, but make it as good as required to protect your secrets.
- Make sure your recipient is as smart as you -- namely, don't email your plan to nuke Boston to someone who you aren't absolutely sure understands basic security principles.
- Use public key encryption like PGP or GnuPG with rediculously long keys.
- Don't send the messages over plain text, anywhere. Type the message on your own box, and encrypt it there before it goes out on the wire. If your box can't do that (and there's usually only laziness to blame if this is the case), make sure you use ssh to connect to your shell account. In this case, you're only as secure as that box's administrator has made it. I would say make sure to use ssl if you're using web based email, but I simply cannot imagine a web based email system that provides what any truly paranoid hacker would trust as secure.
- Double check step 2.
</paranoia>--brian
< plug > Not sure what the competition is like out there, but we certainly provide that at my work. SSH access to a shell account with pine, secure webmail and pop3. The company is edNET if you want a look. It's not our sole line of business, but we're a business provider so to us reliability is essential. < plug > Kev
Shell access is a part of M-Net's service.
If you wanted to add more reliability into the picture add a second MX record pointing to another host with a higher preference value. That host needs to know it relays for your domain and thats it. When your domain goes offline (because you needed to do maintainance, lose power, whatever) mail is automatically received by the other host and queued. When your host returns, mail will be delivered.
You could obviously configure your own box to do everything you want (probably much cheaper than having someone else do it)... then you just need a friend to queue mail if you're down.
Just a thought.
- John C. Gale
Careful. A lot of (all?) high speed providers have prohibitions against running 'servers'. Anything that will accept an incoming socket connection qualifies, in their eyes, and they'll scan for them. You might get this beautiful setup running and then get a nasty note from your provider telling you to take it down, 'or else'. Some providers will let you run servers if you sign up for their super-duper service (at considerably greater cost, of course). Check your provider's policies before you invest much time in this.
I personally think that IMAP access is highly desireable (especially over SSL). The ability to read my mail with all of my folders and stuff identical and syncronized on all my machines (home, work, laptop) is extremely cool.
A web interface alternative is nice too, but be sure it's over SSL.
--
Pierre Phaneuf
I don't know about their email security, but I like their philosophy. Check out http://www.flex.net. I wish there was something similar in the states.
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
I recently moved into a new apartment and ordered Speakeasy DSL for it. I previously had Verizon's/BellAtlantic's DSL at my old place. All I can say is Speakeasy has totally blown Verizon out of the water in every single category so far (except maybe price, but the extra $10 per month is definitely worth having a service which actually works). I have yet to switch my main email address to forward to my Speakeasy account, but I will do so before the end of the year and if their email service is anything like their DSL service I'll have nothing to worry about because their DSL service flat out rocks.
I know they have both web and pop access to your email account and I think you get two totally separate email accounts with the DSL service. I also know that you can at least log in securely to the web based interface (I forget if the entire thing is over https or not). Perhaps they offer this as a stand-alone service as well.
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
https://mail.lokmail.net
They use 128-bit SSL for the login and PGP for the rest. Their on-server key management is kinda kewl too.
Anon
www.twu.net..they're pretty cool...you get a shell account on a debian box...i have my domain there, and mail is forwarded...i can ssh into the box, and it's secure..the guys that own the setup will even ask people what software they want installed every couple of months, and it's all free...a pretty sweet setup if you ask me :0)
$100 per year prepaid. Netcom just turned off it's last shell accounts. Quite a few former Netcommies have switched to Panix.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
CRL has probably been the best ISP I've seen, and recently was acquired by Applied Theory. I dropped my subscription last year, when I moved onto ethernet, but if A.T. is anything close, they;re who you want. CRL was not a new startup (had been around since the mid-80s, was wide spread, reliable and fast. I had a slip/ppp/shell account (5mb shell/15mb web), which is the most I've seen offered for dial-up. CRL, and now A.T., hosts CDROM.com, and the systems (were) Sun boxes. I'm pretty sure they used fBSD for smaller jobs, if I recall correctly (I knew a few people who worked for them).
Anyways, it was slightly over $20/month with CRL, never busy, good speeds, etc. Fast responce from support, etc. If A.T. didn't ruin them, then CRL would be the best.
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"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
I was told by my isp (Time Warner) that they had to block this capabiltiy becasue of problems with spamming. Be careful what you wish for you may get it.
I don't use any of the accounts provided with my cable modem, since they only provide insecure POP access and no shell. Instead, I pay the Data Haven Project for a shell, a reasonable expectation of privacy, and a stable address that will survive my next change of bandwidth providers.
--Gus
First, secure Email--without the use of PGP or PGP-like services such as Hushmail--is a crock. Even with the use of PGP or PGP-like services, secure email is secure only within narrow parameters.
If I want to get access to your email, no matter how secure your ISP is, I'm just going to find the people you regularly communicate with and get access on that end. Or I'll just plant packet sniffers on a network and grab your email as MTAs pass it off from here to there.
If you want secure email, use a good, reliable ISP; connect to it using IPv6 and IPSec, or SSH; use PGP as much as you can. If you want an ubermaildrop, roll your own. But don't have any expectation that it matters a damn if you aren't doing something to encrypt the mail to make sure only you and your intended recipient can read it.
PGP is the most obvious way to accomplish this, but there may well be other ways.
Is there really a market for just setting up a box at a colocation facility and running secure email with it?
I would be interested in knowing this!
The DIY approach is great but what if you want this for your business? You could hire a consultant at $100/hr to come out and do it and then not have that much control
Are there any businesses out there that give you fifty email addresses, control over your aliases and web based email through https://mail.yourdomain.com for around $35/mo.?
J
A closed mouth gathers no foot...
They primarily do web hosting, but the features you are looking for are all still there.
csoft.net
--
Erskin
geek.
Check out http://www.32bitonline.com for services that are reliable. Shell accounts, SSH, PINE and POP3/SMTP services!
Slashdot as in effect...
~ppppppppö
Shell accounts at http://www.32bitonline.com 50 megs 100 megs or 500 megs!
freenet.nether.net is a place to get free shell accounts on a UNIX system. They'll probably have everything you want (except for not rolling over for the lawyers).
:)
Beyond that, DIY, as others have said. Get together with some buds and have a co-lo at a local ISP. Once you get past the hardware, cost is $150US a month (where I live, at least
I have kept the same email address since 1993. I use io.com. IO started shortly after the govt. settled with the Steve Jackson Games guys. I think Steve's brother or something runs it. They have respect for you keeping your privacy. It is an excelent serivce and has all the stuff you listed. A shell account is $100 if you pay a year at a time and $10 a month if you do it by month.
I have been using this ISP for a very long time (7+ years). Things I like.
o When you call, someone is there. 24/7 even on X-mas.
o When you call, you are not told to reboot your windows box because you cannot connect to the ssh server. i.e. they have a clue.
o Nice offsite news feed is part of the deal.
I do not have any relationship with them other than I am a very happy customer. Although I will get a refferal credit if you use my email (mlh@io.com) as the refferal. *hint hint hint*
Good luck,
--Mike
Careful here, before I started using DHCP on my Linux box, I just hardcoded an IP in. It worked until the cable people's DHCP server leased that IP to someone else.
You could have your dhcp client trigger a little script to propagate your new ip out to all the DNS servers if it changes, I guess, or have a little cron job that checks to see if it changed.
You usually get the same IP over again, so it wouldn't happen that often.
You can never put too much water in a nuclear reactor.
Panix.com offers full-fledged shell accounts (sans
dialin) for $100 a year. Combine that with [DSL,
Cable data, university/work access] and you have
a stable platform with ssh access, procmail filtering and a well-known [hell, famous] net-address.
Enroll in an expensive four year university
George II -- Spreading Freedom and American values, one bomb at a time.
I would strongly suggest that you check out Tzo They provide DNS services for broadband users. They have a store-and-forward email service that would provide a good backup for a roll-your-own email setup at home. Plus, they have a dynamic DNS system that will automagically map your domain to whatever IP your ISP is giving you at the moment (very handy if your broadband provider dosn't do static ip's).
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
mailstopusa.com offers pop mail service and is stable
Panix has been around forever. Great team of dedicated people. Running NetBSD, always offering me Kerberos tkts when I log in. SSH, the works. A variety of ISP (dialup, DSL) packages, as well as shell accounts.
I see too many "do it yourself" answers. This doesn't answer the question and falsely assumes the person wants to host his own email.
Question: Can someone suggest a good mechanic for my Chrysler Sebring JX? One who does good work and won't rip me off?.
Slashdot Answer: Spend a bunch of money on tools and buy a good book on autorepair. Next, spend hours every day tickering under the hood. Be careful that you don't completely screw up the pwer brake system and end up driving your family over a cliff.
This is a bullshit answer. What if I don't want to spend the time and resources to host my own email (or fix my car). I might have better things to do with my time.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Hell, Securenym.net seems to pretty well fill the bill for me. They support several mail clients using SSL and SASL_AUTH, and have webmail too. POP3, IMAP, SMTP, and PGP on the mail servers. They have about the best reliability I've seen too. http://www.securenym.net
- 64k/256k ADSL with static IP
- Redhat 6.2 with ipchains for basic security only exposing SMTP and HTTP. I set it up based on the linux firewall HOWTO
- Sendmail for MTA. Standard RH setup.
- UW IMAP, Apache, mod_ssl and IMP to provide secure remote access.
I already had the firewall and sendmail running. I estimate it took about 20 hours to add UW IMAP, mod_ssl, and IMP to my system. It was very easy for an experienced UNIX head like me. I am extremely impressed with how easy the whole Apache, PHP, mod_ssl, thing is and how featurefull. It all just worked, and worked well. Hats off to those folk!check out yi.org. They offer free subdomains (something.yi.org) and one of the nice features is that their service works for mail too. They also have a clients page that has scripts for pretty much any OS you'd need to run (a nice perl one also) to update your DNS efficiently, if the need arises.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
-Jaron Lanier
The only problem about arbornet is the fact that they do not allow POP. It is quite a nice system none the less (I've been using it for a few years now with no major problems).
-Mr. Macx
Moof!
******
This comany provides web/pop/ssh/ftp hosting on Linux machines for $29.95 per month. I've been very pleased so far and have not experienced any outages of any sort.
I'm amazed by the number of people that are suggesting that your roll your own mail server. For a highly available mail service, there should be no single points of failure so you end up with at least the following:
Sorry guys, but I would not be willing to do any of the above just so I can get reliable email. I'm more than willing to pay someone though.
What are you afraid of? That you'll lose a message? That you won't get it on time? That it will be delivered to the wrong person?
:)
Email isn't supposed to be what you describe, any more than snail mail is. Yes, you can make it do what you want, and you can flip burgers with a garden implement, too, but why ask how? What is it that you _really_ want, and is there perhaps a better way to accomplish that goal?
Maybe you should consider getting a cell phone?
I had Pacbell's dsl when they rolled it out in 98, and they provided me with a static ip and dns without any extra cost. That, combined with the fact that I would get 30 pings in quake2 made me the envy of the other admins at work :P
---GEEK CODE---
Ver: 3.12
GCS/S d- s++: a-- C++++ UBCL+++ P+ L++
W+++ PS+ Y+ R+ b+++ h+(++) r++ y+
Relevant URLs: .muttrc doesn't hurt either.
Dan Bernstein's page. Home of Qmail and djbdns.
The OpenBSD and OpenSSH home pages are full of useful information.
PuTTY, a free Windows SSH client Great for on road trips, internet cafe's, consulting, etc.
Mutt, the One True mail client. Takes some getting used to, a good
People seem to overlook qmail when setting up a reliable, secure system. Having dealt with Sendmail and Qmail, I would suggest the latter to anyone who cares about security or performance. The same logic applies to BIND vs. djbdns.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
It's easy. Check out http://www.theshell.com. They are the folks that provide the hosting for AlphaLinux. They have an extremely fast net connection, great reporting, a crack staff that is focused on security, and SSH access. I know the staff personally - they all have extensive security backgrounds. It's a great organization - and for icing they are involved with Linux. And it's definitely within the pricerange you are asking for. Check them out - http://www.theshell.com
What_he_said....
I came from netcom where you hoped someone would
bother to read the support mail about a box
going down. At Panix; the boxes stay up, and
if they go down, they know about and fix it
without being asked, much less begged.
I recently switched by home mail server from sendmail to qmail. If you know sendmail, it's a bit of a learning curve, since it works *very* differently. On the other hand, if you're starting from scratch and don't have sendmail-based preconceptions of how the world should work, it shouldn't be any harder to pick up.
QMail's major benefits are security and scalability. It was designed specifically to avoid the kind of security issues that have plagued sendmail over the years, and the author has offered a bounty to anyone who finds a hole. As far as I know, it's still unclaimed, and qmail is used by many of the big e-mail shops (yahoo, hotmail until the win2k switch, etc...).
I run it with OpenBSD, the primary reason being that I don't have much time to maintain it, ie, make lots of security patches. Not that OpenBSD is perfect by any means, but it does let me sleep a little more soundly at night. Not that I've stopped reading CERT advisories...
The key is to have your own domain, and set up forwarding to your current shell account or to a place like fauxbox.com. Shell account/email forwarding providers will change over time, and this way you can switch when your current one gets bad. You also have the flexibility of running the server yourself, if you choose. But the real key is to have your own domain.
Who cares if you have a static IP? If your house ever looses DSL, mail bounces. Before you even worry about backups, failover, etc., worry that any server which sees the world over the local loop is not reliable. Even if you like your DSL provider, you still depend on the "local monopoly" for the wire and the CO. Oh, and I wouldn't trust that any DSL provider, despite all good intentions, is tooled up to provide 5 9's reliablity (99.999% uptime) at each DSL node - there is simply no market pressure for such a thing. Go with a centralized service far from the edge of the network. Don't do it yourself.
http://www.phreedom.net
They give out free accounts to people who have a valid reason.
-Davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
FWIW, I've had a small FreeBSD 4 box running for 150 days with no downtime. I server several domains using sendmail and apache. I have all the bad services turned off and I use ssh to get to the box - including getting and sending email. The box is a Pentium 233 w/ 32 MB Ram and an 8gig hd. Just so noone thinks I don't push the box, I've done _many_ installs and de-installs from the ports collection, I've got PostgreSQL running as well as Tomcat. I do java development on it from remote, and since I'm a relative novice for sysadmining, I do some pretty darn stupid things sometimes. The box is rock solid. Just recently I had a runaway process consuming 100% cpu and several megs of process memory - and I didn't notice for over three weeks! Kill -9 PID got rid of it and the system is still going fabulously. The system is located with a really small colo facility (how small? I was their first client about 7 months ago!), it has a UPS and it hasn't been down or disconnected since I flipped the switch on it. Oh. BTW, it's in Ontario, in Canada, and I've been in California for the last five months. I haven't even gone in to stroke the darn thing! Its fun having my very own little server :0)
Just to remain on-topic, I'll through in a few more tidbits about the DIY option that I've learned. Shop around for colo for price if it concerns you. I was getting quotes in the USD500/month range, but by finding these small-timers, I'm down at about USD180/month. Also, they don't require me to have a rack mounted computer - nice since they tend to be quite a bit more pricey.
Also, just for some perspective, I haven't used Linux, and my other UNIX experience is while I was working at Sun with Solaris which was definately more unstable (restart required about once every two weeks). I have a friend who runs OpenBSD and has a similar stability record to my FreeBSD box. I have another friend with lots of (unasked-for) NT experience who is actually quite happy with its stability - though I don't know the numbers.
Hope this little summary helps if you go the DIY path.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
If you are looking for the best then you need to go to shellaccess.com. I have been using them since 1985 - yes that date is right - and you can't do any better. Richard NetSocial Co-ordinator IgLou Internet Services
Please send me their resumes, I'm sure we can find better paying positions than at an ISP.
I wouldn't let anyone log on to your system that you don't trust with root access. And never through telnet. Not only do you have to trust their integrity, you have to trust their security know-how and, if you use cleartext access programs, the network they're on. And since obtaining root once you have a local login is trivial, you have to hope that your "Friends" are as trustworthy as you think they are.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
First, secure Email--without the use of PGP or PGP-like services such as Hushmail--is a crock. Even with the use of PGP or PGP-like services, secure email is secure only within narrow parameters.
Have to agree with RJH on this. You can PGP all you want, but unless it was all in RAM on a non-windows, non-caching system, at some point it was written to a hard disk in a non-encrypted state.
Sure, you can encrypt it from sender to receiver, but it's vulnerable at either end of the transmission. If either end is compromised, which time and time again has been shown to be fairly easy to do, the whole exercise is pointless.
Anyone got useful ideas for how to implement a fully-secure RAM-only email encyrption system? This also means originating emails are never stored in unencrypted form and receiver is not permitted to store in unencrypted form.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Everyone in the DIY thread keeps saying you can't have reliability if you're hosting your own domain at home on a single box. That's total BS! You have to consider server load. Your ISP's servers are straining under the load of hundreds or thousands of users. Your box has to support you and maybe a few friends. It will be very reliable. I have two sites running like this off of DSL. They have been on-line for over 2 years with no unplanned outages. With Debian they get updated without being taken off-line. Not a single email has failed to be delivered in over two years. If that isn't good enough for you then you'll never find what you're looking for.
-=-=-=-=- osjedi uses Debian GNU/Linux. -=-=-=-=-
If you want the kind of mail security people drool over, use HushMail. Encrypted end-to-end with other HushMail users. Encrypted end-to-end with your browser via a java applet.
...whether HavenCo has considered setting up a service with all of these features. They would be in a unique position to support privacy because governments couldn't pressure them. They'd probably have very good reliability too.
I agree with Gus - it's a great idea to have a secondary ISP for email, shell and other fun things. I've got cable modem and DSL accounts, but my email lists are remotely hosted from a shell-capable account at eskimo.com, which is one of the older providers in Seattle.
I think speakeasy.net (also in Seattle, straight) offers similar services with DSL as well. They are nation-wide too. Eskimo is mostly west coast (love to telnet in when down in Santa Barbara).
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Steve Jackson is super cool, and he's why we now have the EFF, after all. He even let me borrow some of his computers (pre-raid) to code for the New Orleans WorldCon in an all night code fest once when we were eight hours behind doing panel allocation. Plus, he's a sushi fiend ...
Highly recommend this - when you know how to fight the data nazis from past experience and what your real legal rights are, you're a much safer bet as a mail host.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
You can use fastmail.fm. They don't have everything you want just yet, but they certainly have a good secure web-mail service, and I understand secure POP/IMAP is coming in the next month.
Their primary servers are in the US, and secondaries in Australia, so it would be an impressive disaster that made mail undeliverable! fastmail.fm uses Postfix and Cyrus, which are widely considered the most robust mail servers, and are rarely installed at ISPs due to the technical challenge in installing them.
You'll see that their pages have no graphics or ads at all, so they certainly don't look like your average commercially driven entity!
--Greg, postmaster@freefall.homeip.net
To see Verizon's current situation, just look at the XO Communications TV ads with "Megatelco." That's Verizon.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
IO.com really is anti-government and was founded from the proceeds of a lawsuit vs. the secret service.
This quick message brought to you by the Texas Illuminati.
Reality is just a clever Hack, and the Planck constant is the refresh rate.
Try Anonymizer.com, for 10$ a month you can have an email address that supports ssh, anoymous web surfing, anymous newsgroup access, and 2MB of space for an anonymous www page.All of these can be accessed from either a windows or linux box. Providing a secure, anonynmous connection to internet services is what these guys are all about!
ZipLip.com provides secure web-based email, including SSL connection, good privacy policies, etc. Been using them for about 6 months, and I've had pretty good luck with them so far.
Altough I am not sure the provide remote shell, their tracking system is unbeatable by any SMTP system, nevertheless you could get something similar with traceroute.
Also, I like very much their black cabs, their are cool, much more than a TCP packet and pine in a text console.
Problems are round-trip times and QoS pricing.
I and a friend of mine tested their round trip time few weeks ago. I've sent a 24 hs. letter to California and he returned it to me inmediately. It took 72.34 hours, which much more than a 145 ms via TCP, and more expensive (and slower) than the similar content in a e-mail message. But at least I am sure no sysadmin read my letter...
--ricardo
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
..set up your own mailserver and you get everything of the above included...
my 10 Groschen.
The best way to do this is by installing your own server to a 24h-connected network and doing this all by yourself. Get a working PC - 486, pentium 60, whatever should do if you have enough disk to store your mails (1GB should be more than enough). I have a 512kbps SDSL connection at home, where I also run my own domain on a 166MHz PC with Linux. I have to say that even this machine is overkill for the job.. I can access my mail server with ssh, imap, whatever I can think of. I really recommend this.
The secret to a successful
you want a safe system, and a shell account? Let me tell you this.. NO system is safe if users have shell accounts. Would you trust your mail server if you knew the local kiddies had a shell on it?
To be simple, i was in the same boat as the article writer (sorry, your name escapes me). So i built (for $120) a Celeron-based linux box from spare parts, and run roymail.com
I am slowly adding features, includeing redundancy (i'm in Winnipeg, and will soon have secondary DNS and MX reciprocating with someone in Toronto off a separate backbone), and am adding SSH. My uptime on the server is 31 days, and the server has been together 31 days (I lied: no UPS + power outage two nights ago). I have shell access, web based access, and pop3 access. All server software is opensource, and anyone wanting an account is welcome to one (shell access requires an email to me). What more could i ask for?!?
-MR
-Michael Roy Some people are like Slinkies. Not really useful, but you can't help smiling when you see one tumble down
(Did I sayThat qmail's author has an attitude problem? No, I did not :)
www.myrealbox.com, its free, and it does everything you could possibly want. its good stuff.
*fizz*
Even so, the cost of the first court order will pretty well wipe out that "few hundred dollars per year" for about ten years or so, and since this business would tend to attract others with similar needs, I really don't see how it could be profitable without a massive rate. Plus the attention that it might gather from certain governmental agencies would be another cost for the owners to bear, one that simply could not be ignored.
If you want to remain relatively secure, don't do anything anybody would notice. Get that numbered AOL account off of their CD, get a mail forwarder (maybe), and encrypt your mail with garden variety PGP, nothing fancy. Don't attract attention. Get shell emulation utilities in place of TELNET, or grab a *nix box and do it yourself if you absolutely need.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
"Not permitted to store in unencrypted form" is the problem here. Even if you get so draconian as to forbid cut-and-paste into another window, then saving the new window to disk, it'll still be possible to open up an Emacs window and manually retype the cleartext, headers and all, then save that to disk.
Is it possible to create privacy-enhanced email systems, which only store plaintext to disk when the user makes a deliberate choice? Sure. In fact, I could be talked into working on a project to do just that. But I don't think that what you're talking about, where the user isn't permitted to store in plaintext, will ever work.
__________
The reason why so many people are saying "DIY" is because the original poster is asking the impossible.
"How can I get to the Moon cheaply?"
"Do it yourself. Maybe mine ore in your back yard, run a smelter to make the metals, cast them into the proper shapes..."
Secure email is a hard subject. People study arcane protocols for years to try and come up with secure communications. I'll spare you my credentials, except to say that they're probably greater than most Slashdot readers', and I'm saying that I can't implement a universally secure email system. To people who know how hard the task is, my inability to succeed comes as no surprise at all.
SSH+POP (or other authenticated mail mechanisms), IPv6, IPSec, shell accounts, PGP... they're all great. But this poster asked for a universally secure email system, and no such beast exists yet.
When someone asks you how to do the impossible, "do it yourself" is a perfectly reasonable answer. I'll grant that it's not a very helpful answer, but if you ask a hundred people how to do something and they all look at you blankly and then say "do it yourself," that should be a strong hint you don't understand the question you asked them.
Did I read that right? No policies against portscanning? Gah! Ban this ISP now! Any ISP that will not specifically disallow portscanning by its users must be blacklisted until they change said policy.
Then again, if the "no policies against it" refered to "allowing servers", please disregard the above paragraph (but in the future, try to be more-clear in your statements).
Thank you
Whatever you do, don't use bigfoot.com as a redirector. I went there tonight to change my password and there it was, in plain text, on an insecure form. I'm pretty shocked that they would be that dumb.
Have them move you from the Seattle POP to the New York City POP. Latency will go way down. They are also in process of setting up an Atlanta POP.
Netcom, the largest commercial Shell account provider disappeared the end of last month.
I considered using a DSL line for incoming mail. What happens if the line goes down or my machine crashes? I wanted stability!
Most of us found Panix as the best national shell provider (larget, most stable, been in business the longest, least likely to be bought out or transformed into a portal/AOL clone, most technical staff, reputation for keeping it all going).
It's $10 a month, or $100 a year.
You can read all about our experiences moving to Panix (and other providers) in alt.netcom.emeritus
(I also use their wildcard domain name email forwarding, (another $100 a year) so my email address will never change again).
I've had Pacbell DSL for about 8 months now, and the longest outage I've ever had was for a few hours...
-Legion
You know you can do this yourself right? Setup a box that has an SSL/TLS enabled version of sendmail. Its supported in sendmail 8.11. It'll alow several methods of authenticating for mail relaying. From passwords to certificates. Once you have that setup, get sslwrap and wrap your pop/imap services. I've set this up for the company I work for. IE and Netscape support SSLwrapped Imap just fine. Same thing for pop. Fetchmail can be compiled to support this also. The SSL/TLS stuff is detailed here
:)
Info on sslwrap can be found on freshmeat. Or you can apt-get it
Of course this all depends on your defintion of secure. It covers the authentication part in a layer of crypto, but it doesnt cover the SMTP relaying part. It can, but both servers need to support it. However in conjunction with gpg/pgp, it may be acceptable. Hope this helps.
I would recommend Teleport. They are owned by OneMain which is in turned owned by EarthLink which is in turn owned by (corporate takeover of-the-day).
:-)
While they don't offer IMAP or secure POP, and their privacy policies are a bit limp, they DO offer UNIX shell access (inc. via SSH-- can you say "tunnel?"), and have great reliablility and redundancy. With a dialup, you're timed out after 8 hours.
Oh yeah, you get 50 megs storage space and a bunch of email addy's, too. They have DSL service in selected cities in the Pacific Northwest. If you're somewheres else in the county, they've got free national roaming in a whole slew of major cities. For the most part, it's a great deal.
If you do sign up, be sure and tell them that s-k-i-p-j-@-t-e-l-e-p-o-r-t-.-c-o-m sent you so that I can get a kickback.
P.S.-- My karma is at level 13. Is that bad?
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Hey, I had the same problems you have. I currently have an IDSL line from Speakeasy/Covad. Installation was stright forward and they delt with my local UsWest, (or whatever they are called now). I get e-mails regularly about outages, ports open on this server, what version of this they are running on this Mail server, etc. I have Full Shell Access, IMAP, POP3, and Dial-up. I even get two free Static IPs. When something does go wrong though, their tech support is top notch. They officaly support Linux too!!! They allow me to run a server, (as long as nothing illegal is on it) and they will set me up with a hostname for a one time fee of $25 (assuming you already own the domain.) I got mine from opensrs.net for $10. I just can't say enough about these people, I really think you check them out. http://www.speakeasy.net
Their first operating center was somebody's living room. Their first machine was a 386 running Xenix -- an nasty example of what happened when the Redmond Bit-Twiddlers tried to do Unix. They eventually moved to Sun hardware.
At one time, a Netcom user at a newly-installed POP was quite likely to get a Talk request from the owner, Bob Reiger, asking him if the connection was working OK. Things were never quite the same after Netcom went public and Bob bowed out of management. The handwriting has been on the wall for years: they never upgraded their Sun shell boxes to Solaris-compatible hardware, support declined, etc. Now they're just a tiny part of Earthlink, which doesn't do niches.
__________
How about a simple solution that works no matter who you get your connectivity from?
Get your mail virtual hosted. I use Hurricane Electric and have been a very happy customer for over 12 Months.
Use Fetchmail to download your mail to your local MTA (SendMail, Postfix, whatever you like)
Send mail using whatever MTA you like.
Advantages.
Change between cable or dsl or dialup and keep your email all in one place.
You can firewall port 25 completely
Barnaby
years ago I gave Earthlink a call and asked them why they didn't offer shell accounts to their customers (after hearing some ISP's my friends were using offered shell accounts). He asked if I was a hacker. Confounded I asked the customer service dude why in the hell he'd ask me that question and he told me that I didn't need a shell account if I wasn't a hacker. I think this is a pretty popular belief amoung large ISP's though. They see shell accounts and REALLY secure email as a big sign on their backs that says kick me. For every one of us that only uses said shell to check email or something basic there is one guy who's going to think he's l33t and abuse the privilage. That one guy is the one the large ISP's are worried about because they become liable since their machine is the offender.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
www.winz.co.nz
Okay, so you (may, depending on where you are) have to ship your server overseas, but NZ$50/mo (for *non-commercial* use; it's NZ$110/mo otherwise) isn't bad, and the NZ$ is still dropping like a stone...
Hmmm. Personally I just use the cable modem, with static IP (mmm) and rely on the smtp server sending to me to queue mail when my server's down.
--
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
Oops. That should have been win.co.nz.
Erm. Yes. Well. Sorry for the inaccuracy.
--
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
I've been using MyRealbox for over a year; I can't rave enough about it.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Check out Panix - they're the oldest ISP/Unix shell provider in NYC. Depending on where you live, you'll still probably use your local carrier for DSL, but panix's mail service is great and can be had for $10/month - ssh, pop, shell access.
They're a smaller provider.. Run linux on their main servers. Shell accounts provided and they have dialups around the country. hockey net
They do offer shell only for $10/mo.
Sign up for a single correspondence/internet class at your local university. Mmmm...shell acess, pop3 or IMAP, regular backups. academic pricing
Read my plan to save the Bengals
OK, I sometimes have lapses of manners myself. Nobody's perfect. But could we refrain from moderating up a comment that starts with "you moron"????
Find free books.
I hate to blatantly advertise, but this seems to be the perfect place. Mod me down if its inappropriate.
I run a hosting provider called stratius.com. The server runs on FreeBSD 4.1-STABLE, on a network with multiple redundant backbone links (3 seperate backbone links). GPG is installed, which works very well with mutt for secure email accessed with ssh. Alternatively, mail can be sent/received via POP3/SMTP, or a web-based system (SSL capable). Since going up, we've had no crashes, but in that event, there are two backup dns/mail servers.
Stratius does mostly web-hosting, but mail-only is definatly something that could be worked out.
If interested, please email (sales at stratius.com), or talk to an admin on irc.stratius.com, #stratius.
--
--
grep "xercist"
#Slashdot on OPN!
Shouts go to Odin!
My only complaint about it is that its POP3 retrieval seems to be quite slow - about a second or so per message. And seeing as I get close to two hundred messages from the Debian lists each day, it gets to be a pain. And gnus doesn't seem to work nice with its IMAP.
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.
While security may be an issue for some of you, but biggest issue for me is long term reliability. I want an email address that will last for decades.
Features I am looking for are:
- IMAP (or POP as second best) access. This
might just be used to pull email using
fetchmail.
- Ability to forward by SMTP is desirable.
- A reasonably professional looking address.
- Fast, high availability email receipt and
relay.
- Ability to hold substantial amounts of email
for a while if my home target system goes down.
I see some folks use the IEEE for this. They offer what is essentially an aliasing service, forwarding email from yourname@ieee.org to your "current" email address.I have made the fatal mistake of advertising my @home.com address widely and now that I want to change providers I feel I am going to be screwed. I have a number of options for other addresses, but I want one that I won't have to change for a long time.
I don't want to establish something with a provider that is likely to "change priorities" in the future, or go bankrupt.
Geospatial Programmer for Rent
www.eskimo.com
"and that will at least consider not just rolling over at the first subpoena (if not before). "
What exactly do you need it for?
Requirements aren't met: SSH access
YM SSL. SSH accounts are shell accounts; only SourceForge gives those out anymore.
and I assume POP that you don't have to pay for
The article said "POP over SSL or better." AFAIK, Hotmail can be configured as HTTP over SSL.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Whenever anyone asks me for a hosting recommendation, I always recommend Seagull.
No, Seagull is not an ISP. While it would be nice to have a secure ISP, you're better off using any random joker for your ISP, owning your own domain name so you can relocate it in the event your service tanks (I discuss this in Market Yourself - Tips for High-Tech Consultants) and accessing the hosting service via SSH and SCP (secure copy). Note that it does no good to only use SSH - you have to use SCP as well.
Here's a sample SCP command line, in case you can't figure it out, it's very simple but I had a hard time from the man page:
scp foo.bar crawford@www.goingware.com:.
The above places file foo.bar in the home directory of user crawford on www.goingware.com.
scp crawford@www.goingware.com:web/index.html stash
This copies index.html from directory "web" on www.goingware.com and places it in directory "stash" on the local machine.
Please read my web page on Why You Should Use Encryption
Besides being a good service, it's a small enough company to offer personal service. I've sent support email to the webmaster at 2am his time and had the problem fixed and the mail answered within the hour.
But even though it's a small service, it's not a low-quality service. They have high-performance machines, they are in a good colo facility with a high-speed connection to the backbone, they upgrade their service regularly and the webmaster, Paul Celestin, is just a damn nice guy.
I'm not sure if he still publishes it but Celestin used to produce a CDROM full of useful free source code for the Macintosh. Some of my own Mac open-source programs were on it.
These are the sites I personally have located there:
- http://www.goingware.com/ - My consulting company, GoingWare Inc. My livelihood depends on the reliability of this site.
- http://www.wordservices.org/ - Seagull hosts this public-service site for free in exchange for me placing a small banner ad on some of the pages
- http://www.geometricvisions.com/
In addition, my wife has a couple sites on Seagull through my account, and my friend Andy Hasse used to host http://www.williebrown.com there (yes, if you live in San Francisco you might remember that Hasse was a consultant to mayoral candidate Clint Reilly when the Brown campaign discovered Andy owned the williebrown domain.)I have a couple tips for you on checking email. I use PGP when I'm trying to be secure, but it's really not that much that I really care for complete security. But I just don't like people snooping on me, mostly I think it's none of their damn business what's in my mailbox even if it's spam.
So mostly I read my email at seagull using elm while logged in via SSH, and when my mailbox gets big, I move it to my home directory and copy it to my home machine via SCP:
goingware$ cp /usr/spool/mail/crawford ~
goingware$ echo "" /usr/spool/mail/crawford
back on my home machine:
C> pscp crawford@www.goingware.com:crawford .
It is also possible to download your email via POP with SSH via port forwarding. I describe this on the BeOS Tip Server. It doesn't seem to be responding right now but if you go to its search and enter "ssh" you'll find the tip I submitted called something like "Secure email download via ssh". The instructions have some BeOS specific items but most of what's there will work on any systems.
Don't have SSH? Try one of these:
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
If you have your own domain, can you get email sent to that domain to be forwarded automatically to your ISP?
When it comes to bomb-proof email running off of Unix boxes administered by knowledgeable folks, nothing beats an email account on a large campus. Of course, paying tuition and fees just for the email would be a rather pricey proposition.
-- My choice of computing platform is a symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom.
The BeOS Tip Server page on doing POP with SSH is at Secure Email Download with SSH. Note that POP exposes your password unless you use port forwarding with SSH as I describe (or some more advanced download method). Don't think you're super-cool if you SSH to do your shell access but then download your mail with plaintext POP!
Finally, seagull allows you to install your own CGI's that you can get wherever you want or you can write them yourself with the full set of Linux developer tools they have on the servers - so you can write CGI's in C++ rather than Perl, if you'd like.
Also, I just have their "Lieutenant" hosting for $20/month, they have other options for higher prices such as root FTP server and SSL web page service as well as paying for high traffic so you can run a commercial site there.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Finding a provider who won't roll over on subpoenas is tough - just about anybody big enough to be incorporated (you wanted reliability) will respond, though some will go out of their way to help anybody official-sounding who asks, while others will insist on seeing court orders on paper first. Non-US / Non-UK providers may have some advantages, since most people don't want to bother getting a Finnish court order just to yell at you about something you posted on Usenet that they didn't like.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you want reliable email, it is important that you own your own domain name. If you want email to get to you easily and reliably, then it's important that the domain name be easy for people to remember and to spell, even when you've just spoken it to them over the phone. (Note that while my business name is GoingWare, Inc. I've also registered goingwhere.com and had Seagull alias it to make sure people can find me.)
You think your Yahoo or Hotmail account is reliable? Guess again. How many big companies have tanked in the last few decades? What if yahoo decides it's not worth their while anymore to provide email service, even if you want to pay for continuing to have the privilege of having the same email address for the rest of your life.
I was proud to be one of the first customers for Scruz-Net - until they went down for a week just after I started my consulting business!
And they've been bought out more times than I can count. I keep my old ISP account there mainly because I haven't moved all my web pages yet, but periodically I download all my email from there and pick the real mail out from the spam and send them a message asking them to use my new permanent emails, either crawford@goingware.com or michael@geometricvisions.com.
I've also got a few pages on scruznet that I feel are important for people to be able to find in the distant future, so I'm slowly going through my old site there, moving the pages to one of my own domains, and putting a page in the original's place with a META REFRESH tag and a note. But the problem is that some sites have permanent links to my scruznet pages embedded in their databases that I've been unable to get them to correct.
In the long run, I'll close my account at Scruznet and they say they will redirect accesses to my old site to a single, fixed URL but people may not be able to find what they're looking for.
As I emphasize in Market Yourself - Tips for High-Tech Consultants, it's important to own your own domain name not just to maintain a professional appearance and so your customers can find you, but everyone should own their own domain name so they can have a permanent address.
If you own your own domain name and your service should go bad, you can relocate it to another provider and be up in a few days. Mainly you just have to wait for the new DNS to take effect.
(For other helpful programmer's tips (mostly technical) see GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks.)
An added benefit of owning your own domain name is that you often get what are incorrectly termed "postmaster" email addresses. With these, any mail sent to anyuser@yourdomain.com will be delivered to your mailbox. You can combine this with filtering email clients to suppress spam. You still have to download the stuff but what you do is sort all of your legitimate mailing list mail into separate mailboxes, and mail addressed to your real name into the main mailbox you read, and leave everything else in your inbox.
Then if you need to give a website a valid email address, say to allow them to send you a password, you give them the email theirdomain@yourdomain.com.
If they sell your name to a mailing list at least you know who's done it. For example, this is the way that I know that Citibank is using the email I used to log into my cardholder webpage to access my account - I've only used that particular email for that one page. But Citibank is now sending spam to this address asking me to sign up for their card! How dumb can they get!
If you really don't care whether an email address should last, as when signing up for a web page, this is when you really do want to get yourself a Yahoo or Hotmail account. That way their servers can handle all the spam and not yours.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
I like Hushmail a lot. It can be used with a browser of through a secure HushPop connection. Check out www.hushmail.com (or www.security.nl/hush)
-- unix is for people without a social life - Patrick van Eijk
Might I Suggest Colombia Internet....The most Reliable ISP arround.... http://www.userfriendly.org ________________________________________________
"Gravity cannot be held accountable for people falling in love." -Einstein
Hushmail has a feature that allows reading your email with standard POP clients isntead of their web-based applet interface. Unfortunately, it is for Windows machines only at this stage. Any chance they might release a pure java version? (it's implemented mostly in Java)
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
You could use well.com services. Costs about $15 a month. Not ssh but good service shell, storage use pine client or forward to your account. Also gives you access to all the well.com forums which have quite an eclectic group of voices.
Very good IMHO.
"There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society:To retreat ahead of it" Roland Barthes
Sure try npsis.com
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
I've been looking for a web interface to my mail system for a while now, without much luck. Ideally, I'd love something that would interface to my mh folders, but even reading from the mail spool would be worthwhile. Any suggestions?
I've been using zipcon.net for many many years. They have great uptime, and the main admin (Dan) is a great guy. In the rare times the service has been down, you can allways expect an email.
They offer ssh, and the normal assortment of linux tools.
The only way to be sure.
:-)
I've got a box in a rack hosted by a friend of mine (who is a sysadmin). I use ssh + PINE to read my mail (i know, i know, but i've been using PINE so long i can't get the hang of mutt
i admin the machine myself, so i know it is secure.
Keep in mind that the header of an encrypted email is not encrypted. So if you send an encrypted email to one of your fellow terrorist friends, don't be surprise if the Feds show up at your secret rendez-vous because the Subject of your email was "Bombing preparation notes for Oct 28th, Union Square, SFO".
Software Tool and Die (http://www.world.std.com)runs an excellent ISP that might be worth considering. The first public access Unix ISP, they cater to techically sophisticated customers. Now if they'ed only offer broadband access. Steve Bass
Qmail has one major problem. DJB. Oh, and the license for qmail makes it non-free software.
You'd probably be far better off looking at postfix, which is simpler to configure than qmail, and just as fast, reliable and secure.
-Dom
For $9.95/month, you get full shell access with SSH, up to 11 POP3 mailboxes, and a bit of web space and traffic. The URL for http can be your own private domain, and I don't think they charge extra for that.
I've been using he.net for about five years now and only one time have I ever failed to reach the server because *it* was down. Since it was 11pm on a Sunday night, I was stunned when an actual human answered the phone after one ring. He had already been alerted to the problem and was connecting to the console server as I called. Five minutes later, all was well.
I *highly* recommend Hurricane Electric, but only if you're a self-starter. They're not into holding the hands of newbies.
check out https://mailencrypt.com/
Security of email is not just being scared of the government. Perhaps you might have emails that you don't want just ANYONE on the Internet to be able to easily read??? Could it be that /. readers are informed enough on these problems to actually know that there _is_ a problem...
"sigs are for losers"
There are several free shell account providers as well. Just search on Shell Unix Free at google and you'll turn up a couple sites with lists of them. I can't say that I've found a decent one yet, but I'm still looking.
Go out and get yourself an hosted account that meets your requirements. I don't use my ISP's email for daily stuff anyway. Mainly because it changes every 6 months when I get a new ISP... and I don't want to have to recirculate my new email everytime.
I just found this site with a google search.
It looks like it might do what you want, I didn't look at it really closely. I was going to sign up and try it out, but the page says they are behind on new account creation and have disabled new signups until they catch up.
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One again I'm suprised, but happy to see all the positive comments about Speakeasy. Maybe its just because we give a shit, and do try to maintain the cool stuff like, ssh, imap-ssl, pop-then-smtp for folks on other ISP's ips address. Our mail servers still crap out now and then, the comment about single machines is true. One box just wont cut it, even a dual alpha running Linux - gasp, it does crash.
The cool thing is that we've got a huge mail cluster that should be up in two months or so. Its going to be a ServerIron load balancing 8 BSD boxes connecting to a Net App nfs server. After this thing is up I'll be able to throw away my cell phone! And that makes me even happier than these positive comments!
Yes it is the ultimate in secure reliable email and here is why. Bill Gates often performs personal audits and read-throughs of all of your hotmail to make sure it is all there and safe. He also checks your content to make sure you are not one of those linux zealots. We NEED Bill Gates to protect us from OURSELVES, and with HOTMAIL you not only get this type of personal protection, but you also get secure and reliable email service! And like everything with Micro$oft, it is absolutely free! Because, afterall, does the human soul really have a monetary value?
-roach
Use it for 1 reason: Subpoena. If your inbox is ever subpoenaed, which is more likely to happen then anything else, law enforcement wont be able to read it because its stored encrypted and the key is stored elsewhere. Nuff said. The likelihood of your email being "sniffed" in transit is extreamly unlikeley and if thats your concern you should be using private PGP clients on both sides. As someone who used to work at an ISP, we were subpoenad all the time.
It is the only way to achieve what you are after.
If you're in Seattle, oz.net does DSL via US West or Covad, and is comfortable with users hosting servers (last I checked).
speakeasy.org should be able to do this too, but I'm not familiar with their Acceptable Use Policy.
That looks like a mistake. They used to and should. I'll point it out to the staff.
You may wish to consider an ssh tunnel to an offshore mail account. xs4all.com took a lot of grief from Germany for refusing to take down a site run by the Rote Armee Faktion (Red Army Faction - RAF) for reasons of free speach, and despite enormous pressure they stuck to their guns (bad pun, sorry) and did not compromise their principles. I do not know if xs4all.com meets all of your criteria, but it would be a good "first stop" to check out.
Maintaining your email outside of American jurisdiction would help immensly. If the FBI or CIA really wants the information they'll probably get it, but this would discourage "casual" FBI browsing, in as much as the request to look at your private files would have to go through international channels, to a country which places a rather high value on your privacy.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
9. Residential Services Only
Please note that Telocity is providing the Service to you exclusively for home usage and not for use in a commercial business. Accordingly, you acknowledge and agree to the following:
The Service is broadband Internet access provided primarily to residential users, however, Telocity may provided the service, at its discretion, to customers who will use it for commercial purposes, subject to the below limitations. The service is not available to users who will host commercial websites. In order to prevent usage that may impact other customers, Telocity may, at its discretion, include a limitation on the amount of upstream data throughput, meaning from the Equipment out to the Telocity network. The limitation will be no less than 1.0 Gigabytes per month. In the event that Telocity elects to incorporate this limitation, and your usage then exceeds the maximum, Telocity may, at its discretion, either: provide you an option to purchase additional throughput; reduce the transmission speed for Service until the beginning of the next month; or limit or suspend Service until the beginning of the next month. You will be notified prior to any action being taken.
Or you could rent server space (rackspace.com) and set the stuff up yourself.. secure everything. Remember that the person who owns the machine also owns the data (as i recall) so these people still have rights to examine that data (or quickly turn it over to the authorities)
POP3 is working now.
My company provides many of the aformentioned services, namely, web and email hosting on secure systems (OpenBSD, RAID-5, redundant power and network connections). Email access is through either secure IMAP or web-based using 128-bit SSL. If anyone is interested, visit us at www.siliconashes.net. </shameless plug>