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Best Way to Handle Email for a Small Domain?
CorkBobbingInTheSeaOfLife asks: "Our company just had its bi-annual email crisis/outage, so my boss wants to try something new -- to give me the 'opportunity' to figure out and implement a better way to host our small domain's email. We've changed hosts a few times, but whether we spend a little money or a lot none have been as reliable as we've liked -- companies fold, get blacklisted by AOL, and so forth. Is there a way to be smart about this, without hiring a dedicated email server pro? Do reliable email hosts actually exist? Should we run 'email appliance' software (such as ClarkConnect or E-Smith) on our own server? I'd appreciate any tips here - hell hath no fury like people without email, and I am very afraid..."
I did this same thing, but be warned, I would not trust this scenario if your company does not have it's own data center or you don't plan on hosting it in a data center (ie, don't setup the email server under your desk). One 24 hour span without power or internet and you won't get the chance for "anymore of your bright ideas". There are lots of reputable companies that do email hosting for small businesses that don't charge much, and handle all the backup, power, liability etc for you. Such as register.com or godaddy.com and a handful of others. If the blacklisting from AOL with those providers is a problem, setting up your own SMTP server is much less of a hassle.
Get everyone a gmail account, and forward their old addresses to there.
.sig including the business name, phone, etc.
The price is free, the features are good, and the drawbacks are negligeable if you set everyone up with a good
The unofficial
Your points are valid, but for a small domain, running their own email server can be pretty appealing.
Most of the problems associated with an outage (power or network) can be handled with an MX backup service. It wont save you from a natural disaster that takes out your business, but it'll handle the 24-hour power failures...
Unless they NEED shell access, point all users to /bin/false.
If you don't want to give shell access, don't give an account at all. Create a dummy account (e.g mail-users), and let Postfix manage virtual users linked to this dummy account.
Postfix can manage virtual users pretty easily, and can store them the way you like (e.g, if you want to manage your addresses with a web interface, postfix-mysql is adapted, if you use LDAP, you can use postfix-ldap, etc..)
That way, you can have users with a mail on a single virtual host managed by postfix, instead of local users who have their mail on every vhost and IPs bound by Postfix (or any other mail daemon for that matter, since it is the old way mailds work).
Very good points, to which I'll add what I probably shouldn't:
Make sure you know what you are doing. If this is your first e-mail setup, don't throw yourself into the water before testing several possible scenarios.
Service doesn't come up?
Service is up but doesn't answer to SMTP requests?
SMTP is up, but email is being rejected?
Emails are received but never get to the appropiate mailbox?
etc, etc.
Make sure you know how to trace an email using your server logs. Make sure you know how to emulate an SMTP session by hand (telnet to smtp port)
Like Jhon said, practice backup and restore. This can't be stressed enough. Every so often, try a restore from scratch (bare metal restore) to an unused machine. Make sure you keep spares handy.
Make arrangements with somebody to keep a mail fallback server (your ISP might offer this service) just in case your network goes down.
If you don't have the bandwidth, think twice about hosting your own email. Spam attacks, joe jobs, virus outbreaks can clog your pipes.
Simple answers are the best. But if you don't have the know-how or won't hire somebody with the know-how, the simplest answer is to keep outsourcing your email.
No sig
So you're unhappy with 99.5% uptime.
(assuming that those two outages per year are for a full 24 hours...)
So you're not going to be happy with a solution that involves having someone else do it...
There is no such thing as 100% uptime.
While better than 99.9% uptime hosting does exist,
you're not likely to find one without doing a lot of work, and even then there will still be outages.
There isn't an ISP in existance that will both let a random company do email, and not be on some blacklist somewhere.
Best advice I can offer is to tell your boss that despite the problems you've had with [best service provider to date], there aren't any better solutions available, and you recommend living with the problems, rather than dealing with a whole new set of problems.
Anything else would set you up as the fall guy when email breaks in the future.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
If you go with Dreamhost be aware of the following things:
They WILL NOT get back to you with a service problem within the same work day, unless every site they are hosting is having problems. There is no way to contact them by phone, unless you email them and request them to call you at a certain time, but that certain time always has to be the next day for them to actually call you.
I have had email go out 4 times in the past year. Each time it was only down for 1-2 hours. However, not only was mail not received, but the mail BOUNCED. Not only was I dealing with people in the company not getting email, I was getting email from users trying to contact people at our company wondering why mail to our company is bouncing. After each of these occurances I asked them what happened and if it was corrected. They actually would tell me they don't know what caused it, and they don't know how they fixed it.
Very frustrating, since It keeps happening. The only good news is, when this problem occurs many sites are affected, so they resolve it within a few hours.
Another issue is that to create a new email or user account you have to use their web interface, and the lag time between when you hit submit on the website and when the user can get mail has been 5-6 hours for the past several months. It still says the delay is only 2 hours on the website, but it is incorrect.
There are many many other small things that annoy me, I was thinking about moving the company site and email off dreamhost, but I got a new position where I do not have any responsibility for this stuff.
It is VERY frustrating. I would 100% recommend Dreamhost for a personal server due to their cheap price and good features. However, for a commercial business it is VERY frustrating having noone to deal with for several hours when things go wrong.