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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.
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? ;)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
$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
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.
They primarily do web hosting, but the features you are looking for are all still there.
csoft.net
--
Erskin
geek.
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"?
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
"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?"
IMHO the key issue here is "won't roll over at the first subpoena". Should you choose to supply this service, and should a federal law enforcement agency decide to pursue one of your clients, you will need hundreds of thousands of USD to begin mounting a defense. Assuming you can find lawyers willing to take on said agency. Note that my intention isn't to start an "X-Files" type conspiracy discussion but just to point out that there is a _lot_ of leverage that a government can bring to bear when it wants something.
sPh
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
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.
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.
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.
http://www.phreedom.net
They give out free accounts to people who have a valid reason.
-Davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
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?
print << EndRant
Here's my gripe: My husband had a shell+POP account with CRL for over six years. (Six years!) It was excellent service.
A few months ago, his brother (also a CRL account-holder) send him and a bunch of friends an e-mail saying that his CRL account is going down in a few days and that everyone will now be able to reach him at XYZ@atdial.net (an applied theory account). We asked him about it and were surprised to learn that all of the CRL accounts were being shut down.
My husband was *never notified* that his account was to be closed. Even his brother was only given 30 days notice; they weren't even planning to forward his e-mail to the new address after that 30 day period!
My husband called CRL. They told him there was nothing they could do. His e-mail address of 6 years was to be totally shut down in 5 days.
I decided to go on the warpath. I spent the next three days on the phone with both CRL and Applied Theory. It was insane. CRL said they couldn't do anything about the unix server being shut down. Applied Theory claimed that they "couldn't support" the Unix box, given that they were an MS shop. (Yeah, like it takes a lot to "support" a UNIX mail server that is forwarding mail for a bunch of customers.)
Anyway, apparently, my husband wasn't the only that no one notified about the change. They ended up getting so many angry calls that they did keep the machine up for a few more weeks and then forwarding mail for a while after that.
It was a total flog.
EndRant
My husband's account is now on my server. (I might have taken his last name, but he took my domain name!)
-- Diana Hsieh
-- Diana Hsieh
GeekPress: The Weirder Side of Tech News
Who's the colo provider in Toronto?
HavenCo is a colo facility... not a service provider.
Why not consider starting one at HavenCo? now there is an idea.
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?
--Greg, postmaster@freefall.homeip.net
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!
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
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
__________
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.eskimo.com
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
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
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.
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".
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.
why do people like you have to waste bandwidth complaining about moderation?!?! I laugh that you even bother believing that slashdot has moderation. If you want moderation, come here. As for manners.. I have no respect for slashdot stories anymore, so i'll write like i damn well please thankyou.
OK, a good suggestion. Anyone else know more about GPG? I mean, like exactly how it does that?
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
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