Large Web Host Urges Customers to Use Gmail

1sockchuck writes "LA hosting company DreamHost, which hosts more than 700,000 web sites, is encouraging its customers to use Google's Gmail for their e-mail, rather than the DreamHost mail servers. DreamHost is continuing to support all its existing e-mail offerings, but said in a blog post that email is "just not something people are looking for from us, and it's something the big free email providers like Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google can do better." DreamHost addresses a question about Google that has vexed many web hosting companies: is Google a useful partner, or a competitor that intends to make "traditional" web hosting companies obsolete? In this case, partnering with Google offers DreamHost a way to offload many of its trouble tickets, reducing the support overhead. Is Google starting to make web hosts less necessary?"

Comments

Webmail

[Lord Lode]

For me non-webmail is a thing of the past, I love being able to easily access my mail from any computer anywhere (and I'm on quite a lot of different ones on different places). And GMail is the best of all webmails, so they sure made a good choice!

Re:Webmail

[jeiler]

Ditto. Gmail has one of the best spam filters around, and the convenience of POP3 or webmail.

Now with Google getting into hosting, competition could rear its ugly head ... but would it? Google is competing with free webhosts such as Geocities, but I really don't see it as competition for paid webhosting ... yet.

Re:Webmail

[telbij]

Sorry, web browsers are more widely available than ssh terminals, you fail it.

Re:Webmail

[xSauronx]

to be fair throwing putty and your keys on a usb key *isnt* that big of a deal. but i really dont want to do email browsing in a cli, thanks.

Re:Webmail

[ShieldW0lf]

For me, GMail equals unprofessional. It equals Mom and Pop.

It means you can't even afford to run your own mail server or have someone do it for you.

It means not knowing if the person I'm dealing with is really associated with the domain or the business in question.

It means that my communications are being scanned by a third party, and that I should self-censor accordingly.

It just doesn't reflect well on a person to use GMail for business, in my opinion, and would make me seriously question the credibility of the business.

Re:Webmail

[Ngarrang]

Use the correct tool for the job. Google makes for a wonderful mail host. You can still have your name@company.com address through their mail servers while gaining access to their superior spam-filtering and fantastic uptime.

There will always be a need for web hosters, though a different niche may need to be found. For example, not ever host offers PHP, or Python, or fill-in-name-of-technology and that is where the hosters can differentiate themselves from the free providers like Google, geocities.

From previous experience, e-mail seems to be the red-headed step-child in the service package that a web host offers.

Re:Webmail

[mweather]

For me, GMail equals unprofessional. It equals Mom and Pop. It means you can't even afford to run your own mail server or have someone do it for you. It means not knowing if the person I'm dealing with is really associated with the domain or the business in question. Last I checked, you could pay for Gmail and use your own domain name.

Re:Webmail

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

gmail doesn't reveal that it is being used - you still manage myemail@mydomain.com; it's not forwarded. I suppose if you inspect full email headers you'll find a google mail server handling the message, but the vast majority of people don't bother.

Still, it's a valid point that people should be considering - when you start using gmail for your business, you're giving them permission to mine your business data.

Re:Webmail

[jafuser]

It means that my communications are being scanned by a third party, and that I should self-censor accordingly. If your mail passes through the USA, this is unavoidable.

Re:Webmail

[elventear]

My concern is that email would, for some reason or another take all my information hostage. What kind of accountability would Google offer for a free service, in contrast to the one offered by Dreamhost?

Re:Webmail

[mark_hill97]

They already do that, and its quite easy to set up. You just have to set the mx records and place a file in the root of the server to authenticate that you are the one controlling the server

Re:Webmail

[Pascal Sartoretti]

I love being able to easily access my mail from any computer anywhere

You forgot to mention "anywhere where I have an internet connection". This is why I still prefer a classic e-mail client.

Re:Webmail

[ibmjones]

It means that my communications are being scanned by a third party, and that I should self-censor accordingly.

Most email are sent plain-text, so it doesn't take much effort to scan the contents. That is why you use PGP. :)

Re:Webmail

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see some of that. I think it's kind of old school though.

To me, it means the company knows what they do well and what they don't do well and they are interested in focusing on their core competency and deliver a better grade of service at that than and trying to deliver what they don't do well.

Would you rather have an ISP provide you with half-assed email?

Re:Webmail

[dk.r*nger]

It means you can't even afford to run your own mail server or have someone do it for you.

Yeah, or that I know that my business is not running emailservers, and my time is better spend doing other stuff...

This might matter in the "we run Exchange-server because we're ENTERPRISE and important"-segment, but in the "getting shit done" segment, GMail is very very very good value for money ($0 or $50/user/year for the ENTERPRISE-woo-we're-important-plan).

Oh, and you do know that you can use your own domain on GMail, completely transparently, right?

Re:Webmail

[NeoSkandranon]

It means that my communications are being scanned by a third party, and that I should self-censor accordingly.

What gives you the impression that any other web host wouldn't also be doing this? Do you self censor when sending through any system that does spam detection? They're "scanning" your messages too you know.

Re:Webmail

[SCHecklerX]

Heck, I'm not even a business, and I prefer to run my own mail servers, thanks. I have full control over what comes to them, how I'm authenticated for smtp, etc. If I need a web interface, there's squirrelmail (I haven't had to do this yet, however, since I can do imaps and authenticated smtp with tls, or even pine over an ssh session, if necessary).

I realize this is not for everybody, but for my own use, I can do it better than gmail (mimedefang, milter-greylist, aliases, procmail, spamassassin...all configured exacly how I want.). Flexibility is a great thing, and it pretty much runs itself.

Now if only blackberry BIS would properly implement IMAP.

Re:Webmail

[jeiler]

For me, GMail equals unprofessional. It equals Mom and Pop.

For a business? Absolutely, although it doesn't to some people. But for a home account or hobby account? Not so much.

Re:Webmail

[allscan]

You can use Google for you domain for free, you just don't get unlimited users.

Re:Webmail

[Anonymous Coward]

For me, GMail equals unprofessional. It equals Mom and Pop... Last I checked, you could pay for Gmail and use your own domain name. Actually it's free for your own domain for the same services as a generic gmail account. You only need to pay for it if you want 24/7 phone support and an obscene amount of HDD space. I host a few dozen websites for clients. I've converted most of them over to gmail using their own domain names. I can even remove the gmail logo so it isn't obvious they're using gmail.

Re:Webmail

[superbus1929]

Yes, but you can also use Google Apps, which means everything goes through Google - your MX records, etc. - but you keep your domain.

I use two different domains for email through Dreamhost. My primary domain has it's email set up through Dreamhost, meaning I use their MX records and my webmail is the default SquirrelMail, and my other domain - one that relies on better interaction with my members - has a Google Apps backdrop. They both serve me well, and it should be noted that I bring both of them in through a client (Thunderbird).

Re:Webmail

[Anonymous Coward]

"It means that my communications are being scanned by a third party, and that I should self-censor accordingly."

Are you doing the same for the NSA?

Re:Webmail

[Dancindan84]

I use Dreamhost and their email is accessible by webmail if desired. They use http://www.squirrelmail.org/squirrelmail. It's automatically set up at mail.yourdomain.com at works fairly well. They have a support wiki set up with their email and webmail config, with details on a bunch of different email clients. My customers I've set up with it like the flexibility of having both a desktop email client at the office and access to the webmail portion when they're away (One of my big customers is a used car dealership, so they're often off at auctions and whatnot).

Re:Webmail

[cparker15]

you're giving them permission to mine your business data Where in the privacy policies does it say that?

Re:Webmail

[tgd]

Last I checked the six domains I have sitting on GMail, you can use your own domain name for free.

Re:Webmail

[maxume]

Unless you only accept encrypted messages, you don't have a whole lot of information about what third parties are scanning your email. Even then, unless you are particularly diligent, you don't have any guarantees about what is going on at the other end of the encrypted channel (is the machine a zombie, are they printing out your messages and mailing them to the local newspaper, are they forwarding your messages after they decrypt them, etc).

I would be reluctant to do business with a billion dollar multinational that didn't bother to get their own domain for email, but I don't really care if my carpenter or whatever uses gmail.

Re:Webmail

[vtrac]

You don't even have to pay Google to use Gmail on your own domain name. Check out Google Apps for your Domain. I wrote about it here: http://victortrac.com/migrating-to-Google-Apps

Re:Webmail

[JDWTopGuy]

But it doesn't work in gmail!

Re:Webmail

[Shakrai]

That is why you use PGP. :)

But for the minor fact that G-Mail refuses to let you use encrypted attachments. Dunno if this applies to an encrypted message body but the fact that they won't allow encrypted attachments is a PITA and I have no clue what the justification for that is.

Re:Webmail

[esaul]

Many if not most hosting companies offer webmail (SquirrelMail, etc.) access to their accounts. The biggest problem, I find is the storage space and spam filtering. The reasonable amount of space for almost any hosting account is around 2GB. Traditionally, this is enough for your website and all databases, but when it comes to hosting ~50 email accounts, things get tricky. Really, the default mailbox size in my cPanel managed accounts is only 10MB. I had to increase the mailboxen for some clients up to 150MB - many are often on the road, and need access to their sent mail folders, but then the whole hosting account is running out of quota. While Gmail allows one to send mail as originating from your domain, it does have this unprofessional feel to it. Nevertheless, Gmail was a great money and trouble saving solution.

Re:Webmail

[Anonymous Coward]

your email client works without an internet connection? Sign me up!

Re:Webmail

[Richard_at_work]

So utilise Gmails POP3 or IMAP interfaces and use a classic email client...

Re:Webmail

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Far more importantly, where does it say that you do not?

Re:Webmail

[fruey]

Email (text only) is way more efficient in a cli with mutt or pine

But if you get attachments or images or need colour highlighting, then sure, use webmail.

Over the crappiest 14.4K modem connection mutt over SSH with compression is fast. Now try Gmail on that kind of a connection.

Re:Webmail

[Pascal Sartoretti]

your email client works without an internet connection? Sign me up!

My e-mail client allows me to read e-mails and answer them while being off-line (in a train, at a customer's site without net access, etc.).

Re:Webmail

[jafiwam]

Try to not lie and distort the truth so much.

Not only can you send any type of encryption through Gmail you want, there's friggin Thunderbird plugins that do it automatically through Gmail and IMAP.

Whatever the fuck you are doing that isn't working, well that's because you are dumb, not because it can't be done.

Go back to 4chan or somewhere else where bullshit is appreciated.

Re:Webmail

[urcreepyneighbor]

Google Apps.

Re:Webmail

[afidel]

Just use google apps, it gives you the ability to use the gmail interface with your own domain =)

Re:Webmail

[cesclaveria]

actually you can have both, my work uses google apps and I love it. I have my work address looking "professional" using Gmail, Google Calendar, etc, etc.

Re:Webmail

[lgarner]

> It means you can't even afford to run your own mail server or have someone do it for you.
Or, it means you're smart enough to not waste resources on excess business overhead.

> It means that my communications are being scanned by a third party, and that I should self-censor accordingly.
Perhaps, but every email you send to anyone else may be scanned, archived, published, backed up to an untrusted (by you) third party, etc. I always told people to not say anything in email that they wouldn't want to see in the newspaper, and that was before the Internet took off. Now it's just more true.

I think the rest of your complaints are solved by using your own domain name. I also wonder about a business using an "@gmail.com" address, but no more than "@yahoo.com", "@msn.com", etc.

Re:Webmail

[afidel]

The gmail client for blackberry works fine over GPRS, it's hard to get a worse connection than that =) It's certainly more responsive over EDGE, but you can use it without the fancy address book lookup and stuff even over GPRS.

Re:Webmail

[Robber Baron]

I run my own mail server with a DNS forwarder and I can access my mail from anywhere with a web browser.
I don't use my ISP's mail...
I DON'T trust Google with anything personal.
I DO use Fastmail (fastmail.fm) for testing.

Re:Webmail

[Nicolay77]

You mean the convenience of IMAP or webmail right?

Re:Webmail

[Shakrai]

Try to not lie and distort the truth so much.

Do me a favor the next time you feel compelled to call me a liar:

1) Create a zip file. Put whatever you want in it. Encrypt the contents using the encryption feature of your favorite zip program.
2) Attempt to attach that file to an outbound e-mail in G-mail or attempt to e-mail that file to a gmail.com address.
3) Notice that neither one works and that both are blocked.
4) ???
5) Profit!

Go back to 4chan or somewhere else where bullshit is appreciated.

Maybe you should go somewhere else -- I hear there are websites where lacing your posts with profanities and adopting a holier-than-thou attitude are treated as insightful commentary.

Re:Webmail

[jsight]

Last time _I_ checked, you could NOT pay for Gmail and use your own domain name.

The the last time you checked was a really long time ago. :)

Re:Webmail

[fruey]

Gmail Mobile is great, but I was thinking more in terms of using a terminal / laptop in a hotel / webcafé rather than a mobile phone.

It costs a small fortune roaming on GPRS or other mobile packet data services. Webcafés are a better bet if you have serious email to write (away for a week in a foreign country for example).

Re:Webmail

[weszz]

from what i remember, you say how many you expect to have, and then you can always request more accounts later if you need them.

how many companies out there interested in using third party email are going to need more than 40,000 email accounts?

unlimited makes you feel warm and fuzzy, but telling me i have 1,000 email accounts has the same end effect for me. My site isn't going to hit 200 email accounts, let alone 1000. (it's not a business site, but more of a group site that i offer email accounts to people if they are interested)

Re:Webmail

[AvitarX]

I agree.

A company using gmail for its email is likely not too serious.

On the other hand, a company using google applications for your domain is probably pretty intelligent. I actually think the killer app is the spreadsheet for than the email though.

Re:Webmail

[Beetle B.]

If you're a dreamhost user, you can use Gmail with your domain name for no extra charge.

Re:Webmail

[Vertigo Acid]

From the Domestic Mail Manual, Section 133

2.2.1 Inspection of Contents

First-Class Mail is closed against postal inspection. Federal law and USPS regulations restrict both opening and reviewing the contents of First-Class Mail by anyone other than the addressee.

So, no. Unless there's white powder coming out of the letter and you happen to be mailing a senator, you can be assured that your mail isn't being read

Re:Webmail

[FishWithAHammer]

Just tried. Worked fine. :D

Re:Webmail

[Xtravar]

Contents of your zip: TERRORIST_TRAINING_MANUAL.PDF

Just kidding.

Re:Webmail

[sglewis100]

Yes, putty on a USB key isn't a big deal - but knowing that the port 22 is open wherever you are going is.

Re:Webmail

[boyko.at.netqos]

I'll disagree here.

While GMail may be unacceptable for business communications in a company of 100+ employees, most people realize that in a small business, a separate mail server is just unnecessary overhead. Just because you can "afford" something doesn't mean that you should go ahead and do it.

What am I going to do, spend thousands on an exchange server and get WORSE e-mail service? (I hate Exchange's Web interface.) Even my business partners who have their own e-mail addresses on their domain choose Google Apps For Your Domain.

And while you may not be sure the person you're dealing with is really associated with the domain or the business in question - I've never found that to be a problem for the small shops.

As for communications being scanned by a third party and self-censoring accordingly, I actually trust Google when they say they're scanning for keywords, not context, that it's done via computer, not via human intervention - and it's a moot point anyway. You should self-censor on ANY e-mail communication these days because of warrantless wiretapping.

If my gmail.com e-mail address would make you seriously question the credibility of my business, it pegs you as a customer who values appearance over efficiency and effectiveness, and that's exactly the sort of customer that's not worth having.

-- Brian Boyko
-- Sole Proprietor, Blogphilo New Media
-- brian.boyko@gmail.com

Re:Webmail

[SkyDude]

For me, GMail equals unprofessional. It equals Mom and Pop.

Quite the contrary if you took the time to learn about it.

If the Gmail return address perturbs you, then add a custom domain to your return address. You can have any domain in the return address as long have an email account on that domain. Gmail is quite handy for email consolidation - checking several accounts in one place. Certainly, there are others that do that, but none I've tried have the spam filtering capabilities of Gmail.

As for not being able to afford your own mail server - lots of small businesses, schools or non-profits don't have those resources available, so Gmail fills the bill quite nicely.

It's not perfect, but it just may be the next best thing for some entities.

Re:Webmail

[geminidomino]

Yes, because we know that our beloved TLAs would never, ever make an end-run around the law in the name of "security."

Re:Webmail

[Mister Whirly]

"GMail equals unprofessional

I think you misspelled AOL....

"It just doesn't reflect well on a person to use GMail for business, in my opinion, and would make me seriously question the credibility of the business."

Well, everybody has their own standards, but I generally tend to rate a business on how they conduct themselves, not so much who they use for their email. But maybe that's just me.

Re:Webmail

[Anonymous Coward]

I followed your steps and it works... you must have some spyware on your computer or something.

Re:Webmail

[Anonymous Coward]

I love gmail myself, but have to agree. Nobody wants possibly confidential email (billing info, presentations etc)ending up in an inbox on a free public service like hotmail or gmail.

This would work in some cases but any time it's business related, public email is bad bad bad. It makes you look pretty ghetto...

That being said, I have no qualms about Gmail being used for personal stuff, but if it's business, I want myname@mybusiness.com.

Re:Webmail

[ballwall]

I'd assume that's more of a virus protection measure than google actively blocking encryption. A while ago encrypted zip files where the password was in the email was a widely used attack vector for malware. Most everyone (my company, for example) blocks them now, so it's not as widely used.

Re:Webmail

[nine-times]

Because no other countries would ever read your e-mail?

Unless your e-mail is encrypted, assume others can read it.

Re:Webmail

[CastrTroy]

For the record, Dreamhost supports webmail, via squirrel mail. I used it for quite a while. It's pretty slow an klunky. I currently forward all my mail from dreamhost to GMail. It works a lot better. The interface is faster and easier to use. The spam filtering is many times better, and I'm just more happy in general with GMail. I'm not really disappointed at the mail offerings from Dreamhost. They have a lot of other great features. Good email support would be nice, but even if they gave it a ton of effort, they would have a hard time doing better than GMail.

Re:Webmail

[Anonymous Coward]

You look at the MX records for the addresses you send email to in order to determine if they are using gmail and hence lack credibility?

Wow, hardcore!

Re:Webmail

[Torinaga-Sama]

I think you are probably being a bit stuffy and old fashioned.

"For me, Gmail equals unprofessional. It equals Mom and Pop."

While I agree that it is not the best idea for a business's only web presence to be a Myspace or Facebook page, an appropriately named email address from a reputable free service is good enough for most standard brick and mortar businesses, especially one like gmail that allows you to use your own domain name.

"It means you can't even afford to run your own mail server or have someone do it for you."

If IT is not your business this doesn't matter. I almost never check that headers on messages I receive, do you? Who cares if someone else runs your email. In Dreamhost's case, they were already providing email, but both the webmail and the spam filtering were lacking, which are the two areas Gmail really shines.

"It means not knowing if the person I'm dealing with is really associated with the domain or the business in question."

You are either too paranoid, or not paranoid enough, I can't figure out which.

"It means that my communications are being scanned by a third party, and that I should self-censor accordingly."

Unless you use encryption, all of your emails are like unsealed postcards anyway and thus free to be read by anyone smart and willing enough to do so.

"It just doesn't reflect well on a person to use Gmail for business, in my opinion, and would make me seriously question the credibility of the business."

Again, you would likely never know they use it on the back end, and even if they are using the straight Gmail address, non-techie folks won't care. Heck, even many tech folks who understand that it's expensive to run a business will probably understand.

Re:Webmail

[threexk]

Thunderbird+IMAP is faster to use than Gmail to me. Last time I checked, Gmail was less responsive and seriously lacked keyboard shortcuts -- very mouse-driven.

IMAP offers nearly the same degree of portability as Gmail, the downside being you have to install/configure an IMAP client on all machines. However, I mainly use three machines, and my IMAP provider also provides a webmail interface in case I'm on the go. With Thunderbird I also download my messages for offline, which has been useful on several occasions.

You could use Thunderbird to access Gmail and potentially get the best of both worlds, however I haven't had any good reason to try this -- seems like unnecessary complexity.

Re:Webmail

[linuxpyro]

I would agree with this. I use Gmail for an @gmail.com address, and I really like the interface. However, I do enjoy the control I get having my own mail server. I am really the only regular user of Email, and can work fine with a Squirrelmail Web interface and encrypted POP.

I do have to say, though, that having Gmail around will hopefully attract people who would otherwise use a misconfigured mail server and thus possibly cut back on spam overall.

Re:Webmail

[rssrss]

"For me, GMail equals unprofessional. It equals Mom and Pop."

This of course explains why several of the nation's top universities have gone the G-mail route.

Re:Webmail

[Shakrai]

Just tried. Worked fine. :D

Interesting. I can confirm that I just tried it again and it worked just fine too.

This did not work a few weeks ago -- I was trying to use my G-mail account to backup a handful of important files (mainly financial data/Quicken stuff) and I wanted to encrypt them first. It refused every single encrypted file I attempted to upload -- encrypted zips, PGP encrypted files, etc, etc.

Feel free to mod my other posts down, since I appear to be completely misinformed on this issue. I wonder when it changed?

Re:Webmail

[grassy_knoll]

Ok, I just did the following:

1) created a zip file.
2) encrypted said zip file with GPG.
3) attached that .zip.gpg file to an email and mailed it to one of my gmail accounts.

Worked fine.

Perhaps it's not so much a matter of gmail not liking encrypted attachments as it is gmail not liking .zip files.

At least others seem to have problems sending .zip files to gmail.

Re:Webmail

[Anonymous Coward]

We know who you are.

We have read your email.

We are coming to your home.

Please have coffee and cookies.

Re:Webmail

[Anonymous Coward]

user error....

Re:Webmail

[AnomaliesAndrew]

"For me, GMail equals unprofessional."

I used to feel this way too, but it's just so ubiquitous nowadays. The internet is not dominated by only the megacorps, so who cares if it's a mom n' pop shop? They're usually better anyways than getting stuck in a hold queue in India.

"It means you can't even afford to run your own mail server or have someone do it for you."

Or it means you'd rather not have to manage 40 different email servers, and you've chosen one generic centralized account.

"It means not knowing if the person I'm dealing with is really associated with the domain or the business in question."

Except you probably clicked on the email address while browsing a website on that domain, or typed it in from a business card.

"It means that my communications are being scanned by a third party, and that I should self-censor accordingly."

Well since you've got your tinfoil hat out, you should be aware that a few of the governments of the world have been reading all of our internet traffic already with even more dubious purposes. What, are you selling bomb parts? I know I know I know, I'm a huge privacy advocate, but this is kinda splitting hairs. Maybe if some perv at Google was rubbing one out to my emails, I'd be disturbed. It's just a computer that's doing the parsing for advertising purposes in their case. Have you ever used a credit card to buy something? Then you've already been living with this!

"It just doesn't reflect well on a person to use GMail for business, in my opinion, and would make me seriously question the credibility of the business."

Responsible people always take this into consideration when making any transaction with any business. I can honestly say I've been screwed over more by big business than the mom n' pops who actually still value their customers.

I understand your opinions and I'm sure they're shared by many... which is why self-hosting email will never go away... but it may just be a wise suggestion by DreamHost if a) their support is insufficient and b) enough of their customers don't really think it's worth the extra trouble.

I mean, this IS DreamHost we're talking about here. You're likely to only find mom n' pop shops there anyways.

Re:Webmail

[HughsOnFirst]

My accountant has been sending encrypted PDFs of my tax returns to me in gmail for at least 3 years

Re:Webmail

[whoop]

For me, GMail equals unprofessional. It equals Mom and Pop.

It means you can't even afford to run your own mail server or have someone do it for you
Um, isn't using Gmail equivalent to having "someone do it for you" and therefore unprofessional? Heck, even having a web host provider is unprofessional. It shows you can't manage your own clusters of servers, manage your network, etc. All of which is vital for Jane's Lollipop Store. I wouldn't buy lollipops from someone who couldn't do this minimal amount of stuff.

Re:Webmail

[S.O.B.]

As for not being able to afford your own mail server - lots of small businesses, schools or non-profits don't have those resources available, so Gmail fills the bill quite nicely.

Any decent hosting package includes a mail server. For about $40/month I have a VPS that can host up to 30 sites each with their own mail server complete with webmail and spam filtering (albeit not as good as Gmail's). I wouldn't consider that unaffordable.

Re:Webmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, he still supports Obama after all we've learned about him. He obviously isn't the sharpest tool in the shed. Either that or he believes that God damns America too.

Re:Webmail

[grassy_knoll]

Think you're right.

From his description, he's ending up with a .zip file which contains encrypted files. Any mail system which blocks attachments by file name and blocks .zip files would remove the attachment and / or block the mail.

When I tested it, I ended up with a .zip.gpg file. That made it through fine.

Re:Webmail

[beckerist]

http://mail.slipperyfish.net/ : Now you don't have a login but I do. In fact, I have 25 and I don't pay a dime...

Re:Webmail

[Anonymous Coward]

As a US citizen who runs his own mail server in a colocation facility -- citation needed, please.

Re:Webmail

[phrenq]

While GMail may be unacceptable for business communications in a company of 100+ employees Why? I work for Google, so I'm not entirely impartial, but we use Gmail here with well over 10k employees, and it is by far the best corporate email experience I've had. I'm on several high-volume mailing lists which I have permanently archived and can search through immediately.

With Google Apps, nobody knows your domain is using Gmail, so there's no appearance of unprofessionalism to external companies.

For most large companies, email is not their main focus. It's just a distraction, something they need in order to do their real business. I'd think that offloading that headache would be a relief.

Re:Webmail

[PerfectlyNormal]

And if you're not a DreamHost-customer, you can *still* use GMail with your domain name for no extra charge (meaning, free). Isn't the world just amazing?

Re:Webmail

[pjt33]

If you're seriously worried about that then run sshd on port 443 on a box which doesn't need to serve https.

Re:Webmail

[Smidge204]

If your ZIP file contained any executable code, that might have been what blocked it. I know for a fact that GMail will do everything it can to block EXE attachments - even if they're renamed and put into password protected RAR files inside other password protected RAR files. I have no idea how it detects them but it's very difficult to get one through.

=Smidge=

Re:Webmail

[LiENUS]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail#Privacy_concerns/
specifically the following is relevant

# e-mail messages have to go through intermediate computers before reaching their destination, meaning it is relatively easy for others to intercept and read messages;

Re:Webmail

[pdboddy]

Walmart used to be Mom and Pop. And Google was first run on a freaking computer made with legos. And Apple's first computer prototypes were slapped together by a couple of guys in their parents garage. Hmmm, yep, sure was unprofessional of them, boy did they go nowhere fast... wait, what?

It means that my communications are being scanned by a third party, and that I should self-censor accordingly.

Do you have any idea how the internet works, really, do you? Do you know how many "third party" servers your email (and any other internet traffic) goes through to get to the destination? Can you vouch for each and every one of them to be 100% safe and private?

Re:Webmail

[pdboddy]

You also could just change the extension of the file to .pdf, and it should email just fine. At least, it did in the past, the last time I tried.

Re:Webmail

[Knara]

As as a fellow dreamhost user, I noticed recently that they started integrating Google Apps into the hosting management area of the control panel. Might be useful as an alternative to Squirrel Mail (which I also think is klunky, but I use it as IMAP usually, so almost never am actually in that interface).

Re:Webmail

[Oligonicella]

I've worked at the PO. Mail travels through too friggin' fast for anything to be opened, read and closed. Also, the volume is prohibitive. The mere fact that you get your mail within a couple of days is proof it ain't happening.

Conspiracy theorists, however, tend to require proof of tracking of every piece of mail for all eternity in order to discount the conspiracy.

Re:Webmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here... if I see Gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail anywhere in the headers (yes, that's right, I look deeply), I don't deal. That person has zero credibility with me.

This is just a web host trying to get out of the responsibilities of providing mail services or having customers hosting mail services on their networks.

I host my mail services myself on my servers If I can't do that (i.e. the web host's network is blacklisted everywhere) I ditch that web host. If they were to tell me to use Gmail in response, I'd rightly tell them to get stuffed.

Re:Webmail

[r7]

It means you can't even afford to run your own mail server or have someone do it for you. Which is probably not a big deal for non-business use, unless you are a systems administrator.

Gmail has other baggage though, as does Yahoo and most free email providers:

  * messages are delivered and read in clear text, without any encryption (tls, https)

  * Google, Yahoo et al searches and indexes all your email and attachments and keeps them even after you've deleted them,
  providing unlimited opportunity for economic espionage (whether they take advantage of such access or not is another matter)

  * does not provide the quality of spam filtering that some well run non-free providers do

But at least they are reliable, and their spam filters are not prone to FPs, which is more than you can say for Yahoo, Earthlink, etc.

Re:Webmail

[dodobh]

That's because email is really expensive to run. Spam filtering, especially outbound filtering is needed. Then you have all the complaints from people sending to Yahoo! and Hotmail. Especially given the lack of responsiveness from these two. Yahoo! is slightly better than Hotmail, but not by much.

Re:Webmail

[Anonymous Coward]

lol, then stick to Outlook if you wish, and spend shitloads of $$ on the servers, software and IT to support it. We're using a free Google Apps for Domains account with out own domain name and our customers don't know the difference, except we get more done with less overhead.

Re:Webmail

[peragrin]

Not to be mean but the Post Office loses and routes mail wrong on a regular basis. My Grandmother once sent me a birthday card. It arrived 3 weeks after my birthday. I figured she had forgotten since it only normally takes 2-3 days to send a regular card.

Then i looked at the date the post office stamps the envelope with when it goes out to cross off the stamp. It was dated 3 days before my birthday.

so had the card with decent handwriting and the correct address(yes I double checked) on it been sent regularly it would have arrived on my birthday. instead it took three weeks to arrive. While I highly doubt anyone opened it up to read it, the PO does misplace things on a regular basis. Enough for a paranoid person to worry about it at least. As for me it was just a card.

Re:Webmail

[TheLink]

Whether or not you gave them permission, they are doing it. See: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/intl/en/privacy.html

"Google maintains and processes your Gmail account and its contents to provide the Gmail service to you and to improve our services. The Gmail service includes relevant advertising and related links based on the IP address, content of messages and other information related to your use of Gmail.
Google's computers process the information in your messages for various purposes, including formatting and displaying the information to you, delivering advertisements and related links, preventing unsolicited bulk email (spam), backing up your messages, and other purposes relating to offering you Gmail. "

You can test it out very easily, just send an email with the appropriate keywords and if you have the default gmail UI, you may see ads that are related to those keywords.

If you accidentally clicked on those ads, the advertisers could figure out a thing or two, set a cookie etc... So be careful what you click on.

Re:Webmail

[Anonymous Coward]

My company has 3 domains that are set up with google apps. Obviously, all of our mail goes directly to user@mycompany.com. Google provides the mail servers and a web based interface, as well as calendar, chat and a couple other collaboration tools that all stay neatly contained in our domain. We also moved our customer management system off site to a server running SugarCRM, for those of you who know what that is.

Now, this is where things start to get interesting. Our ISP, E-LEVEN, got into a spat with its backbone provider, Belgacom. Belgacom cut them off, and we were left without internet in the office for over a week. May is a very bad time for this to happen: we sell summer travel and May is the month where we make most of our sales. Thanks to Google Apps, we didn't miss a beat. We just forwarded the phone lines to employees' home phones and sent everybody home to work. Employees communicated with google chat, customers experienced no lag in their response times and we were literally saved. Since our customer DB was off-site and web-based as well, it was a completely transparent transition.

We got our lines back in the office and went back to work in the office for obvious managerial/supervision reasons, but that week was the most the productive we have had in years.

Anybody who doesn't think google apps is an excellent solution for small business either doesn't have any idea how small business work or doesn't know how google apps works.

Re:Webmail

[hedwards]

US only, please, I doubt very much that we're the only country that does that. I'd be surprised if China and Russia weren't as well. And there are probably others. It doesn't make it right, or a good idea, but realistically, it's far fetched to suggest that it's just 1 country doing it.

At any rate, any country with tubes going through it to other nations could very easily do the same thing.

Re:Webmail

[hedwards]

AFAIK customs agents are the only people that are authorized to routinely open mail. It's true that's not domestic mail, and most people don't send a whole lot of it, but it's worth noting that it can and is done. But, it's a necessary practice, allowing mail and boxes to go uninspected through the border like that would make mules a thing of the past.

Re:Webmail

[colmore]

This is why I don't trust anything but W.A.S.T.E.

Re:Webmail

[timeOday]

"Last I checked the six domains I have sitting on GMail, you can use your own domain name for free."

Doesn't gmail put commercials into the emails though?

Re:Webmail

[kundziad]

No, there are no commercials.

Re:Webmail

[legirons]

For me, GMail equals unprofessional. It equals Mom and Pop.

It means you can't even afford to run your own mail server or have someone do it for you. More to the point, it gives the impression that you can't setup your own server to accurately delete the 99.96% of your emails that are spam?

I think that describes most people, even professional programmers...

Re:Webmail

[McDutchie]

It means that my communications are being scanned by a third party, and that I should self-censor accordingly. If your mail passes through the USA, this is unavoidable.

Which is an excellent reason for non-USA companies to avoid Gmail and any other US-based email service like the plague.

Re:Webmail

[jaseuk]

The reason these are blocked is due to viruses using them as a simple way to bypass virus scanners. Virus scanners cannot easily scan password protected .ZIP files.

I wouldn't consider a password protected .zip files an encryption mechanism.

Re:Webmail

[infinityxi]

The GP was a douchebag but I am afraid I was able to encrypt an attachment and send it from my gmail account to my domain account hosted by google. I used winzip and used AES encryption (just picked whatever) and it seemed to have gone through. Maybe google is somehow seeing your encrypted files as executables as I know those are blocked. I want to reproduce this so let me know anything additionally that you did.

Re:Webmail

[statemachine]

I work for Google, so I'm not entirely impartial, but we use Gmail here with well over 10k employees, and it is by far the best corporate email experience I've had.

The problem with your argument is that Gmail is internal to and controlled by Google. Many other businesses may have a problem with using a third-party email service which scans the email for advertising purposes (no privacy) and permanently stores all emails (no forward liability protection). All of which is then subject to the business' ISP's data inspection as it transits the wires multiple times. And that's just internal company email. For those reasons alone, Gmail will always be viewed as a mom and pop solution. There are other solutions available to healthily-solvent companies that don't compromise privacy or at least contribute to the problem.

Gmail has many legitimate uses. But it shouldn't be used carte blanche for many legitimate reasons, too.

Re:Webmail

[Anonymous Coward]

"Perhaps, but every email you send to anyone else may be scanned, archived, published, backed up to an untrusted (by you) third party, etc. I always told people to not say anything in email that they wouldn't want to see in the newspaper, and that was before the Internet took off. Now it's just more true."

You and me both. But I can't get people to realize that this is more of a personal, immediate threat than someone flying a transcontinental jet into a building.

Re:Webmail

[msouth]

As for me it was just a card.

yeah, by the time it got to you, that's all that was in there. And your Grandmother is probably still wondering why you never thanked her for the massive check.

Re:Webmail

[Anonymous Coward]

- reliance on internet connectivity for internal emails

- security and privacy

- sensitive data that must not leave the company

need more? :)

Re:Webmail

[mashade]

You can turn on the extended keyboard shortcuts. Here's a reference sheet:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6594

Re:Webmail

[cheater512]

I pay the $50/year primarily for the obscene amount of space.

Its well worth it.
You get some nice goodies and the lack of ads is really nice.

Re:Webmail

[cheater512]

The Ads go next to the commercials from my understanding - not in the actual email like Hotmail.

I've paid the $50 to remove the ads and get some other features though. :)

Re:Webmail

[cheater512]

Thats not true mining.

Google isnt doing anything with your data - they take a peek, show the ads and then forget.

Re:Webmail

[J'ai Friedpork]

If you're a Dreamhost customer, you can use any working email for no extra charge. It's pretty trivial to set up an email address that just redirects to whatever email address you choose. (And of course the aforementioned Google apps for your domain would work equally well, if not better.)

Re:Webmail

[FishWithAHammer]

It detects them via file extension. Remove .exe files (maybe .com, .bat, and .dll too, but I know .exe) and you'll be good.

Re:Webmail

[J'ai Friedpork]

You make a valid point, but how hard is it to encrypt sensitive data? If Company X can't be bothered to take steps to ensure privacy, regardless of how the information is delivered, then they're below the mom-and-pop level of professionalism anyhow.

Not to mention those of us who would prefer a nice mom and pop company to some corporate monstrosity. (Because clearly a business must be one or the other.)

Re:Webmail

[Nimloth]

Well for Dreamhost customers, using Gmail actually means creating an address from your (Dreamhost) hosted domain and have THAT run through Gmail.
No one will ever know you use Gmail except you and the folks at Dreamhost. This is all integrate in Dreamhost's web panel. I think it's pretty neat and certainly not "unprofessional".

Re:Webmail

[windex82]

Did you use the same set of files? Gmail has a small attachment size limit combined with a small daily file upload limit.

Re:Webmail

[mibus]

For most large companies, email is not their main focus. It's just a distraction, something they need in order to do their real business. I'd think that offloading that headache would be a relief.

I think you'll find that it's even more of the case for SMEs (like where I work). Mail was being a headache for us, we offloaded it to Google, and we've been pretty happy since then*. As the poor guy handling the home-grown mail setup part-time**, I was certainly relieved!

(* my perspective, obviously, not my employer's)
(** duties-wise. I am employed full-time, but am usually busy with other stuff)

Re:Webmail

[rabbit994]

Email for students in most cases is lost money. If GMail is more then willing to take this cost for them, most universities will be more then willing to offload it. Just because top universities does it, doesn't mean it's good idea.

Frankly, all the information Google collects is just asking to be data mined. They may not do it now but when Shareholders come a knocking and asking why they are making maximum profit, expect "Do not Evil" to go right out the window.

As for Dreamhost wanting people to go to Gmail apps, again, who can blame them? More profit for them.

Re:Webmail

[dwater]

> And GMail is the best of all webmails, so they sure made a good choice!

I still prefer Fastmail.fm's web interface.

Having said that, I haven't used GMail in anger, and I hear it takes a while to get used to it's, er, unusual way of doing things.

Fastmail.fm have free accounts, so it's easy to 'try out', but I chose to pay for five year's worth of 'Enhanced' service - though my renewal comes up next year, so that'll be where I have to put my money where my mouth is (again).

Re:Webmail

[Duncan3]

No, it's email that's a thing of the past. 99.9% by bytes is spam. It's insanely expensive to host, process, and store, and NOONE wants to pay for it. In other words, it's a stupid to be providing it. Google and others have enough people in one place that the government is willing to chip in to gather intel.

Spam is killing email, look for alot more companies to dump it.

Re:Webmail

[TheLink]

"Google isnt doing anything with your data - they take a peek, show the ads and then forget."

Citation please.

Re:Webmail

[gnupun]

How the hell is parent troll? Is there any guarantee email data won't be abused? Blindly trusting large companies and government not to abuse this data is downright stupid.

I think this foolish quest for more security at the expense of liberty is very harmful for future generations. You will just have to accept some dangers (terrorists etc.) are not worth abandoning hard-won freedom.

Re:Webmail

[Anonymous Coward]

I never suggested it was just one country. We do however have traditions and a constitution that we inherited and the duties of watching out for our liberty. We are in steady decline of doing our duty.

Re:Webmail

[stephanruby]

My concern is that email would, for some reason or another take all my information hostage. What kind of accountability would Google offer for a free service, in contrast to the one offered by Dreamhost?

First off, the free version of gmail allows you to download all your email using either POP/IMAP access, all you have to do is go into your "settings", enable POP access, and check the first radio button that says to "Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded)". Second, you could also create a filter that forwards all your gmail email to your backup hotmail account (that filter is server-side, so technically it would be working all the time, but better still if your hotmail account could check other accounts using IMAP/POP -- you could set it to check your gmail account at a regular interval -- without deleting anything). Third, I believe there are also some third party freeware/shareware utilities that allow you to backup your data (but those also use POP to access gmail, so I'm not sure what's so different about them from normal POP clients).

That being said, I don't even think we're talking about the free version of gmail here. Dreamhost is not a free host, most likely a customer of dreamhost already has a domain name, and may be willing to use the paid version of google apps (or the free version of google apps for educational institutions, or the free version for US IRS-recognized non-profit organizations)

The paid version of google apps will cost you $50 per user/per year. That version comes with a Service Level Agreement. I think it said something like 99.9?% uptime, blah, blah, blah... It gives you 25 GB of space per user. It gives you everything a normal free gmail account gives you (i.e. POP/IMAP, filters, etc.). It also allows you to route your MX records and SMTP traffic through a third party for archival, policy management, and any additional filtering and compliance purposes. So if you set up everything properly, all your incoming mail and also your outgoing mail should get archived in one place. In the case of the paid version, google gives you a free limited version of Postini, Postini is one of the third parties you can plug into gmail to act as your go between archive (but there are others, and technically Postini isn't a third party anymore because google acquired it -- but it still acts the same as your mail goes through Postini's servers before it's received or sent out).

Now the educational version of gmail seems to be like the paid version. I say "seems" because I really don't know. It's advertised as having 25 GB per user, it's advertised as having no advertisement, it's advertised as being free, but I really don't know if it has an SLA -- because having an SLA means that your customers can sue you if you don't abide by it.

Now as to the non-profit version, the free version for non-profit organizations may not get an SLA, at least I didn't get one for my non-profit. But to be fair, I didn't qualify for the non-profit version they advertised, there are seven kinds of non-profits recognized by the irs, my organization is recognized as a non-profit fraternal organization, but not as a charity or a religious organization -- so technically it didn't qualify for the non-profit free version -- although google still allowed us to keep our own domain hooked up to it and gave us 6 GB per user plus advertisements (just like the normal free version, except it's using our own domain). But even with that version, as an administrator in charge of the domain name, google still allows you to pass all your emails through a third party archival service, that third party probably won't be Postini (only the paid version of google apps gets limited Postini functionality for free, and for a normal non-profit Postini is too damn expensive anyway), but if you have access to a unix/linux server -- even some virtual server -- you can install some free open source software that can act as a go-between just like Postini will do -- except the open source version is ten times better and more customizable than Postini -- and thankfully even the free version of google apps will allow you to forward your MX records to that third party server.

Re:Webmail

[rtb61]

Hmm, hidden invasion of privacy. A lot of people would want to know if email coming to them or email being sent out is going far beyond the recipient. Thanks for that useful bit of information. I had no idea google was skulking about in the background hiding behind other domain name and turning private emails into what the googlites like to refer to as 'postcards'. Really makes you wonder how google would treat VOIP should they take that on board as well.

Re:Webmail

[Bitsy Boffin]

So you sent people home, and productivity went up, so for "management reasons" you brought everybody back, to the low productivity work environment. What does this tell you about your managers.

Re:Webmail

[Auraka]

That would be a pretty ignorant assumption on your part.

Re:Webmail

[Tacvek]

I've never understood using webmail. To me an IMAP service has always made more sense. A local mail client is almost invariably easier to use and better supported by everything. Further, the local client keeps offline copies of messages, so I can review email and compose new ones even if I have my laptop with me, even if I don't have internet. Further, any decent IMAP service will have some form of limited webmail interface for use when you are away from your main computer. But surprisingly many people now use web mail for everything.

Re:Webmail

[cheater512]

The citation is in your post. :P
It may be in legalese but its still perfectly readable.

Re:Webmail

[irenaeous]

I have done exactly the same thing for a few websites I manage. It solved a problem for me on one of the sites which was getting hammered with backscatter. Basically, I let Google deal with the backscatter.

But it is still criminal that there are millions of sites out there that still bounce spam.

Re:Webmail

[CTachyon]

If I had to take a wild guess, you hit an anti-malware heuristic. For a while, a lot of malware e-mails consisted of an encrypted .ZIP file, with the decryption password in the body. Apparently this confused a significant number of people into believing that the .ZIP file's contents "must be" legitimate, so they ran arbitrary executable code. This, of course, also hid the payload from anti-virus software. As a result, a lot of anti-malware filters now suspect any message with an encrypted .ZIP attachment.

Besides, you should never, ever rely on the encryption features built in to any .ZIP program. The traditional PKZip/WinZip encryption algorithms are nearly useless and straightforward to brute force. If you don't like public key encryption, use GPG with a symmetric key.

Re:Webmail

[TheLink]

It sure doesn't seem so perfectly readable to you. Maybe that's the intention of that google page ;).

You said: "Google isnt doing anything with your data - they take a peek, show the ads and then forget."

1) Where does it say they forget?
2) "Google's computers process the information in your messages for various purposes, including...".
Where does it say that "various purposes" does not include data mining.

Unless the word "including" recently changed meaning, "various purposes" is _not_limited_ to everything following the "including" bit.

The stuff following "including" is a subset of "various purposes". Google can do all sorts of crap and still not need to change that clause.

"and to improve our services", Google could provide services to the NSA too.

Re:Webmail

[cheater512]

And if Google is providing services to the NSA, how does that make them different from any other ISP? :P

Use your common sense. What can they possibly do with my email that I would actually mind?
They cant get someone full time to read it and I dont mind them analyzing it digitally to improve the service.

Re:Webmail

[TheLink]

Hey you said: "Google isnt doing anything with your data - they take a peek, show the ads and then forget."

And you have provided no evidence to back that up.

You may not mind what Google does, other people might. And lots of potential gmail users live in countries where the ISPs aren't so friendly with the NSA.

I'm actually not that bothered about Google doing stuff with all that data, what bothers me about Google is their poor security track record.

As for using my common sense, I get paid to use my "common sense" :).

Re:Webmail

[jryan54]

Well it looks like the backlash against it has already started... http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=696223

Re:Webmail

[cheater512]

Erm. What poor security track record?
The only thing I've heard about are a couple of XSS flaws which have been fixed nearly immediately.

Re:Webmail

[TheLink]

Uh go google for them ;).

In the past you could view other people's emails, take control of other people's gmail accounts, post blogs on other people's blog. There's also the recent open relay problem with gmail. Plenty more if you bother googling.

Looking at the details of some of them, it's rather sloppy work with respect to security. Won't be surprised if there are design errors which will be hard to fix (or may never be fixed - just worked around every time someone gets clever). When you design stuff securely, some of these things just can't happen - yes there'll still be bugs, but different classes of bugs. You don't have to believe me, but I've been in the IT security line before and also written webapps and other stuff.

And the rate they are acquiring new staff and new companies (see the various opensocial hacks), it will be even harder for them to improve security (assuming they're really interested in the first place).

You may say ah some of them are old bugs. But in my experience, code quality is very dependent on who the programmer is, if they're still around, they'll be doing similar things. Just look at the various programs infamous for security problems, as long as the coders were the same, they continued producing problems. It could take 5-10 years for people to get a clue, you think the bosses can wait for them to get a clue? They'll just release anyway - they have to, I don't blame them.

Very unprofessional move

[elrous0]

Dreamhost contends that "almost nobody CHOOSES a web host based on their email features." That may be true, but that's just because a robust email service is EXPECTED. If I've spent money to pay a provider to host my "acme.com" webpage every month, I damn sure expect that I will be able to make "headhoncho@acme.com" my official email address and my business card (and get reliable service out of it). The idea that I'm going to be content putting "headhoncho_acme6@gmail.com" on my business card instead is laughable.

If Dreamhost doesn't want to include email with their web hosting accounts (and it looks like this is the first step towards phasing it out), then they need to get out of the web hosting business. They obviously don't have the kind of professionalism that it takes to run a web hosting company (as further evidenced by making glib comments referring to "studly CEO's" in an official blog).

Re:Very unprofessional move

[HansF]

Using google apps for your domain enables you to use your headhoncho@acme.com... they just take your mx record and handle your mail.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[Anonymous Coward]

Hold on, this doesn't stop anybody registering a domain like "acme.com" and forwarding all email directed to "headhoncho@acme.com" to 123xyzgmailisgreat@gmail.com. A good registrar would allow that.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[Anonymous Coward]

[...] I damn sure expect that I will be able to make "headhoncho@acme.com" my official email address and my business card (and get reliable service out of it).[...] And what exactly does this have to do with TFA?
Smtp relay anyone?

Re:Very unprofessional move

[morganga]

Use Google Apps, they provide a yourname@yourdomain.com email service. http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/users/gmail.html

Re:Very unprofessional move

[Anonymous Coward]

Google host the email but you have to user your own domain and not gmail.com

Re:Very unprofessional move

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the article should be titled
"Large Web Host Urges Customers to Use Google Apps"

Nonetheless if you RTFA it's clear:

Did somebody say.. Google? In fact, as youâ(TM)ve maybe already seen, we recently made it very easy to use Gmail for all your email hosting with us, still at your own domain!

(Emphasis NOT mine)

Re:Very unprofessional move

[neoform]

Any bets google will soon be offering free web hosting?

I wonder if DreamHost will then throw its hands in the air and surrender when they do like they're doing now for email.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[MaxInBxl]

Well you can simply configure your host to forward your "me@acme.com" mails to "me@gmail.com" automatically. It is then trivial to set Gmail up so that incoming mails sent to "me@acme.com" are replied with "me@acme.com" as a reply-to address.

I use this for several of my domains. The clear advantage for me is that I can use the Gmail interface which I've known and used for years now. Every hosting provider has their own brew of online mail and I've yet to find one that can compete with Gmail.

This is starting to sound like a fan boy post, but another sizable advantage of using Gmail (or hotmail or yahoo-mail etc.) is that your current ISP probably does not have global coverage. So when you move to France next year and have to use neuf.fr as your provider your old e-mail address and messages will not follow you. However you can check your hotmail / Gmail / yahoo for free, no matter where you live and no matter who your ISP is.

However, on a professional front, I personally don't think it is a good move for the simple reason that people hang on to ISPs despite better competition only because they've been "using the same [IS provided]e-mail for years now".

Just my 2 cents

Re:Very unprofessional move

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously they are referring to hosting your own email with gmail.

You setup the account with gmail, set the DNS records and webmail.acme.com (or whatever you use) and magically mail sent to foo@acme.com ends up in that gmail interface.

Surprise, surprise, a company in that business making that suggestions knows slightly more than you do about what google offers.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[Metasquares]

I concur. I've had an account with Dreamhost for the past 5 years and the minute they nix their own POP/IMAP email service is the minute I find another host.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[Anonymous Coward]

You are very misinformed elrous0. I have used DreamHost for a long, long time and noticed that the gmail option popped up recently. Just to clarify this has NOTHING to do with getting an @gmail address! You can use gmail with YOUR OWN e-mail address and to access your e-mail you even get the option to use webmail.yourdomain.com instead of gmail as well.

It's in fact a very nice and convenient service which many customers will enjoy. Personally I like the traditional dreamhost mail options and will not make the change but there the way you can use gmail is not like you describe.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[DerekLyons]

They [Dreamhost] obviously don't have the kind of professionalism that it takes to run a web hosting company (as further evidenced by making glib comments referring to "studly CEO's" in an official blog).

(Chuckle.) I love it when a Slashdot stereotype shatters... I mean, usually the complaint is that most companies are bland and sterile soul sucking Dilbertesque hells... And here we have a complaint because a company isn't!
 
Now, obviously not everyone is going to be happy with a given company - someones always going to be upset. (And here in the 'net age the squeaky wheels of course get all the attention.) But I've been a Dreamhost customer for over eight years - and I've had nothing but good experiences.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[mrboyd]

No one is asking you to use the gmail.com domain for your professional emails.

Google App is a free mail hosting for companies domain (up to 100 email) using their gmail technology. And yes you can replace the gmail logo with your company logo and choose your favorite colors.

I recently decided to get rid of our internally hosted and managed email server to use google free services and as a part time sysadmin I am delighted. It hassle free. Took all of five minutes to set-up including sending an email to my ISP asking them to redirect our MX server.

It gives our employees POP, IMAP and a state of the art Web access and it runs on a distributed server farm with 99.99999% reliability. My boss is paying $0 for it and is very happy about that.

I didn't even bother looking into the other features but apparently we also have our own company branded google calendar, google chat, google docs and google sites.

There currently isn't any interesting "Google App Engine" based application but from the look of the admin dashboard it seems that I will be able to add the one I like to my domain. If the Google App Engine picks up that will mean free company branded - server farm hosted - applications like forum, image gallery and even maybe CRM application...

An small to medium sized company would be really stupid not to take advantage of that kind of offer and dreamhost advice is actually making sense. Want to host your own PHP pages? use DreamHost. Want a professionally run email server? Go see google/hotmail/yahoo.

From a business standpoint it makes a lot of sense. Running an email server is a much more complicated matter than stacking a few servers together and providing AC, UPS, fire extinguisher and fat pipes. I am pretty sure it provides them and their customers with little added value for the cost of running it. Especially with the current barely manageable spam levels.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Hell, I'll be happy when google starts offering paid hosting: it's probably the only provider in the world for which I have 0 uptime and load balancing concerns.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[phoenixwade]

[...] I damn sure expect that I will be able to make "headhoncho@acme.com" my official email address and my business card (and get reliable service out of it).[...] And what exactly does this have to do with TFA?
Smtp relay anyone? You must be new here...
Why would you ask a RTFA question?

However, to answer, it pertains to the relevance of using gMail as an email service separate from your webHosting service... Or, to decode for you, it's a discussion as to whether or not DreamHosts email commentary is a good idea for businesses, or at all. In other words, I quite germane to TFA.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[Anonymous Coward]

The non-profit I work for has hosted with Dreamhost for years, and by far the worst aspect of their wanky, buggy hosting is their email servers. They go down multiple times a day--some times every day for weeks. It's maddening. Our primary web designer has been encouraging us to shift our mail hosting to Gmail anyway--and this just makes it all the much easier. Now I just need to convince the guy who does our network support to relax a bit on his drive to have us serve our mail locally using Exchange and everything will be hunky dory.

Considering that a lot of Dreamhost sites seem to be maintained by relative novices, I believe they're actually doing their customers a favor by making it easy to use Gmail. They only thing they're not exactly saying clearly is "since our mail servers are really, really bad, you're better off not using us..."

Re:Very unprofessional move

[Anonymous Coward]

Any bets google will soon be offering free web hosting? They already do.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[Ephemeriis]

Dreamhost contends that "almost nobody CHOOSES a web host based on their email features." That may be true, but that's just because a robust email service is EXPECTED. If I've spent money to pay a provider to host my "acme.com" webpage every month, I damn sure expect that I will be able to make "headhoncho@acme.com" my official email address and my business card (and get reliable service out of it). The idea that I'm going to be content putting "headhoncho_acme6@gmail.com" on my business card instead is laughable. I know you're going to get eveleventy-billion responses pointing this out, but it needs to be said - you don't need to have an @gmail.com address to use Google's mail system. Google provides it apps for your domain. You can get mail, calendaring, chat, docs, all of it at whatever.acme.com We've got a couple clients we've set up with Google's domain apps specifically because they can offer a better service than we can.

If Dreamhost doesn't want to include email with their web hosting accounts (and it looks like this is the first step towards phasing it out), then they need to get out of the web hosting business. It may, or may not, be the first step in phasing out email hosting - the article really makes no mention of that either way. But even if it is, why would they get out of web hosting? There are plenty of people out there who simply want a website with no email at all. I know this for a fact because we've got some of them as clients. They could easily drop email entirely from their most basic plans and offer it as an option for the folks who really don't want to go with some other company (like Google).

They obviously don't have the kind of professionalism that it takes to run a web hosting company (as further evidenced by making glib comments referring to "studly CEO's" in an official blog). It's called "humor". If you take a look around at other official blogs you'll see other examples.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[joelstobart]

They have released a limited trial of application hosting. Only python at the moment - its called the Google App Engine and its like a free (for limited use) version of Amazon's EC2 Cloud.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[neoform]

that's geocities, not 'hosting'.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Not quite what I had in mind - but worth checking out all the same, thanks for the link.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[ReallyEvilCanine]

Dreamhost didn't host the mail before. It's run through SquirrelMail. I write this not because I'm some sort of pontificating intarwebs expert with illogical expectations and notions but because I have multiple domains running on DreamHost, like this one. I highly recommend them.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[FishWithAHammer]

Google App is a free mail hosting for companies domain (up to 100 email) using their gmail technology. And yes you can replace the gmail logo with your company logo and choose your favorite colors. Actually, you can have more like 10,000 users just by requesting it. Dreamhost has a deal with them where you have unlimited.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[microcars]

...They obviously don't have the kind of professionalism that it takes to run a web hosting company (as further evidenced by making glib comments referring to "studly CEO's" in an official blog).

on the contrary; whenever there is an issue of any sort they own up to it and explain fully and publicly to their users and anyone else who cares to read the blog or the status pages.

THAT is a sign of professionalism that I don't see anywhere else and it the one of the reasons I stay there.
Open and transparent communication.
No layers of gatekeepers telling you that your call is important and they will get back to you. No cube farms of sales droids trying to upsell you with every trouble ticket or question.

The CEO's studly manner is just icing on the cake.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[Rob T Firefly]

I remember thinking much the same thing the first time I signed up with an ISP that didn't offer its users a chunk of public webspace; they just directed their customers to Geocities and such. This was back when domains were still expensive and having a URL of www.ISPname.com/~username wasn't a dealbreaker.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[afabbro]

DreamHost is not phasing out email...and having been a customer for nearly 3 years, I can report they are indeed one of the most professional web-hosting companies. Non-stuffiness != non-professional.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[Binary Boy]

Totally agree - Dreamhost has been the most responsive and responsible vendor I've ever used in shared hosting projects - meaning less than a few hundred bucks per month, no one has come close to them in my experience. Of course, I've not tried every hosting provider out there, but against those I have, Dreamhost is tops.

It's just a bonus that you have a pretty geeky, almost confessional CEO who sends out some fairly amusing newsletters - they certainly provide much better communications about exactly what they are doing than just about anyone I've seen. The comedy can be ignored if that's not your thing.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[Mr_Silver]

Well you can simply configure your host to forward your "me@acme.com" mails to "me@gmail.com" automatically. It is then trivial to set Gmail up so that incoming mails sent to "me@acme.com" are replied with "me@acme.com" as a reply-to address.

This is a so-so solution, but it isn't perfect.

Whilst your reply-to address shows the email address you actually want people to see, the "from" still contains your gmail address.

Google's solution to this is the configuration options which allow it to send email with your name in the from field. However it doesn't actually change the "From" header but populate the "Sender" header. This means that when someone opens your email in Outlook then they see your email as "bob_jones@gmail.com on behalf of bob@jones.com".

Personally I'd rather people see only the email address I want them to see.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[Igmuth]

Dreamhost didn't host the mail before. It's run through SquirrelMail. I write this not because I'm some sort of pontificating intarwebs expert with illogical expectations and notions... Not only are you not an expert, but you don't even know what you are talking about. Squirrel Mail is a web based mail app, not a mail host. Saying Squirrel Mail is an email host is like saying that Thunderbird is an email host.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[diegocgteleline.es]

The next time it'll be web page hosting what google and microsoft will be ofering, and dreamhost will have to say "choose their services, ours are not good enought"

Re:Very unprofessional move

[Anonymous Coward]

...and having been a customer for nearly 3 years, I can report they are indeed one of the most professional web-hosting companies.

...until you need to use SQL, at which point the TI-83 in your desk drawer is a more-professional web hosting company.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[Knara]

Yeah, by and large I like Dreamhost (except they need a more robust VPS offering). Their shared hosting is priced just right as far as I'm concerned.

Most of the complaints I see about DH are from wankers trying to run a 24/7/365 uptime business on shared hosting. They're amateurs that are trying to get by without paying for an SLA, and then get pissed when their shared hosting has unexpected downtime.

Aside from those wankers, most DH users (myself included) seem quite happy.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[93 Escort Wagon]

If Dreamhost doesn't want to include email with their web hosting accounts (and it looks like this is the first step towards phasing it out), then they need to get out of the web hosting business. They obviously don't have the kind of professionalism that it takes to run a web hosting company (as further evidenced by making glib comments referring to "studly CEO's" in an official blog). I've been a Dreamhost customer for roughly three years now. While there have been one or two outages over that period, overall I've been very happy with them. I never had trouble with the email service either - but, about a year ago, I started running it over to Gmail instead. Quite frankly, Gmail's web interface is head and shoulders above anything else (Dreamhost provided Squirrel Mail, which is better than most but still doesn't even come close to Gmail).

I could still use POP or IMAP to get to my Gmail, if I wanted to; but I have no interest in that. I _like_ the Gmail interface.

I think Dreamhost was simply watching what many of their customers are already doing, and admitting it's a good idea. I think that's actually an intelligent move on their part.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[BitZtream]

I've been running our companies mail server for ~6 years now, and really, it isn't much more than providing AC, UPS, fire suppression and it doesn't need a fat pipe. Our company provides a web based service, to which far more traffic goes to our offsite machines (at the co-lo) than we get in email traffic, including spam. Having the server internally means that downloading messages and attachments is practically instant, which is nice when you deal with large attachments often.

We have one box that handles all of our email accounts, the only thing I've done to it in the time its been running is upgrade the disk space once, and added a cron job to call sa-update for spam assassin once in a while. We have one employee who leaves all his messages in his inbox until Outlook explodes from having a PST file thats too large, in which case he switchs to thunderbird and 'cleans up' which last time got his inbox down to 14 gigs, not sure what the rest of his folders looked like at that point. After recreating his PST he goes for another few months uuntil he gets another 2 or 4 gigs of PST and does it again. He's learned to deal with the stupidity of Outlook himself so I don't even deal with him.

Hosting email is not exactly a difficult task unless you are some moron running Exchange and need 8 machines where 1 should do. Our employees get encrypted access, both internally and externally via IMAP/SMTP and Web mail. We do not allow POP3 access because mail is SUPPOSED to stay on the server for backup/auditing purposes, and that helps to ensure that email is available when using web mail rather than a real client.

Its integrated into our accounting system so I don't have to worry about adding/deleting accounts when people come and go, or dealing with password changes or any of that crap. Took me a day to setup properly, has been running ever since.

Its rather retarded to think that email is 'expensive' for someone like Dreamhost.

If you're already managing a web farm, throwing in an email server for your company should be a no brainer. If you as an admin don't see it that way, get a new line of work because it shouldn't be that hard for you.

But, being the lazy admin I am, and being that its a secondary responsiblity, I too considered gmail. Found it'd take me longer to setup the authentication stuff to hookup with google than I've spent servicing the system in the last 6 years and figured that would be a silly waste of time. And now, we stuff breaks, I still have complete control (and responsibility).

As you can see, offloading email isn't always the brightest of ideas when you look at TCO and assuming you have admins with a clue. If you don't have admins with a clue, or you're a 10 person shop with no internal admin staff anyway, Google's definately where I would suggest sending your mail if you don't have any reason to consider your emails private. If you already have server admins however, out sourcing is probably a dumb move. If you admin suggests it, you might seriously want to consider finding his/her replacement.

Electricity is cheap.
Bandwidth is cheap.
Hardware is cheap.
Admins are a dime a dozen, good ones will cost you a nickle.
  --
Free is not always free.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[ProfessionalCookie]

Dreamhost will not kill their email services. They're shoddy hosting at times, but they're also smart, nerdy and honest. As long as Google offers a better webmail experience, IMAP, POP and as long ast they don't add ads to my emails, and as long as I can use my domain names with them Gmail is the best solution for me.

I run all my small business email straight to gmail's service and it's been great ever since. Everyone (as in my clients and their employees) prefers it. I also have a dreamhost account and I like it.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[idlemachine]

Any bets google will soon be offering free web hosting? That will be as soon as Google App Engine goes out of preview. It's not entirely free, but the current "fee threshold" includes "500MB of disk storage, 10GB incoming bandwidth per day, 10GB outgoing bandwidth per day, 200 million megacycles of CPU per day and 2,000 emails per day".

Re:Very unprofessional move

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody (http://acme.com/mail_filtering/) has something to say about using at @acme.com..

Maybe you could not? :)

Re:Very unprofessional move

[mrboyd]

Well, I was talking about small to medium size companies, not the company who can afford a full time IT Admin.

Managing an email server is not cheap. Sure the cost of material isn't very impressive to add a little server with a little qmail or what have you running in a corner. When you start talking about reliability, availability, security, multiple access point and cost of actually supporting that and fixing issues for your users it gets very expensive.

My company is currently very happy to have outsourced its email, telephony and CRM solution. We're a small unit and we cannot (do not want to) afford the upfront cost of setting up a decent infrastructure and we certainly can do much more useful thing with the money we save not having to pay for a competent IT admin.

I'd rather spend $3k every month to buy some add space than pay you. Sorry but the ROI is much more interesting for me like that at the moment. :)

STREWTH

[Kamineko]

Strewth! I use Dreamhost for my hosting, and their uptime is a bit pants. (There's many websites dedicated to how terrible DH is. Many, many websites.)

This announcement just makes them seem wonderfully credible, don't you think?

Are there any good, big hosts located in the UK?

Re:STREWTH

[youthoftoday]

I'm happy with Site5. It's in the US but the latency beats my previous (London) host.

Re:STREWTH

[WK2]

I'm really happy with nearlyfreespeech.net. It's not in the UK, though.

Re:STREWTH

[telbij]

(There's many websites dedicated to how terrible DH is. Many, many websites.)

The vast majority of which are written by ignorant script kiddies who think that for $10/month they should be allowed to utilize unlimited resources and slow down the server for everyone else on it. So they make a big stink about it publicly then go to some other shared host where they inevitably make life miserable for 50 other customers on whatever server they get assigned to (I've been on the receiving end of this and it's not cool).

I've had an account with Dreamhost for 8 years, and during that time I've also had accounts or worked with companies hosted on dozens of other hosts. My anecdotal evidence is strong. As far as cheaped shared web hosts go, Dreamhost is one of the best. Certainly many people get lucky with other hosts, but most hosting companies have not had to deal with the technical issues that Dreamhost has overcome over the years.

That said, I never recommend shared hosting anyway. VPS technology (especially Xen) is the only way to guarantee good QoS as websites become increasingly dynamic.

Re:STREWTH

[morgdx]

I second that, they host the website for my OS project very well http://jfin.org/ and are pretty good value for money.

Re:STREWTH

[Mike89]

The issue is, you can't fill your monthly transfer quota without 'slowing the server down'. They still get you for CPU use, even when you're serving static content (eg. images) and not even close to the monthly limits.

Re:STREWTH

[maxume]

I like their (nearlyfreespeech.net) pricing but haven't bothered getting an account to investigate their feature set. If you care to say what you have had success and issues with, that would be cool.

Re:STREWTH

[maxume]

I've been with dreamhost for a couple of years. When I read the complaints about them, I get the feeling that it is because they have an awful lot of customers and a very small number of those customers have hilarious expectations for $12 a month. It's like the reviews on Amazon where someone complains that a book didn't cook them dinner, or that a hammer didn't come with any nails.

Of course, the downtime never seems to affect me, and I didn't get smacked in the face by the great billing SNAFU of 2008 either.

Re:STREWTH

[Kamineko]

The only expectation I have of my $12 a month is that I'm allowed to use, if I so choose, every single GiB of web space and every single GiB of bandwidth allocated to my account. If I get anything beyond a 'Watch out, Kamineko! You're reached 5% of your limit. (Disable this warning in the panel.)', then I really have no time for them. (Which is why I don't update my website very often because I don't trust the guys to do anything beyond the simplest of things, which is rather frustrating.)

The cheeky bastards had the audacity to alter some of my database schema while I was deploying the original version of an app I was writing. Sure, it was a terrible app then, but I would have expected them to have simply temporarily suspended whatever process was misbehaving rather than edit my damn database.

Re:STREWTH

[maxume]

Yeah, that would piss me off.

I don't know enough about databases to ask this question (i.e., I have no idea if 1 bad table will effect a server), but can the changes they made be characterized as something that would protect their server?

Re:STREWTH

[telbij]

I take those claims with a grain of salt as you can serve an awful lot of static content on very little CPU. How do I know the people making those claims aren't also running WordPress?

If the claims are true than Dreamhost is in the wrong on that one, but I've yet to see any really credible evidence.

Re:STREWTH

[eck011219]

Not to mention their billing fiasco last year -- due to a dumb human error, they auto-billed most of their customer base (even people who weren't signed up for auto-renewal) for a year or more of service in advance.

They got me for $400 and took more than a month to return the funds. They dinged others for thousands. All the while telling everyone everything was fine. So if Dreamhost says its mail service is NOT adequate, it must be REALLY bad.

Personally I never had a problem with mail at Dreamhost -- uptime stunk (and the billing issue was the last straw), but mail worked pretty much how it should.

Re:STREWTH

[Kamineko]

It would protect their server insofar it would reduce the load, yeah. (It was a malformed set of queries running on a table with bad indexes. Basically, a mistake was made, so a lot of searches ran across a lot of data by accident.)
It would have definitely affected the other users of the shared DB hardware, unless they had a limit per user.

Re:STREWTH

[DerekLyons]

Strewth! I use Dreamhost for my hosting, and their uptime is a bit pants. (There's many websites dedicated to how terrible DH is. Many, many websites.)

So what? 99.99% of the comments/reviews on the 'net are about how horrible the subject of the comment/review is.

Re:STREWTH

[Knara]

While that was indeed a pretty inexcusable screwup, why the hell would you allow anyone to autobill you for hosting? Yeah sure, it's easier, but this is one of the many reasons that allowing people to just use your credit accounts is bad.

Re:STREWTH

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure there are good, big hosts in the UK. Try: http://www.google.com/search?q=uk+web+hosting. I picked off the top link, and to get about *one-fifth* of Dreamhost's bandwidth and server space, you'd pay £69.99 a year, ~US$160, verses US$120. Grant you, they do offer 24/7 phone support.

Ever hear the old saw, "You get what you pay for?" Cheaping out on your web service = cheap service. D'oh.

Re:STREWTH

[Anonymous Coward]

You have your experience with them, and my experience is that for the amount they charge, they are great and have been pretty stable.

Maybe I am luckier then you as regards to the server cluster am on (am hosting on milk).

Then again, just 2 people talking about their own experience is not going to be enough to decide if DH is good / bad.

Re:STREWTH

[colmore]

I've been using Dreamhost for 9 years, hosting my own and several clients' commercial sites. Their uptime is well ahead of industry averages and their customer service turnaround is a thing of beauty.

Yes you can ultimately get more out of something like rackspace, but that's a different tier of service, and is priced accordingly.

If you want to get a web business going for $10 / month, DH are a very decent choice.

Re:STREWTH

[mattwarden]

Very cool, thanks for the tip. Any specifics around your experience?

Re:STREWTH

[eck011219]

The point was that people who were NOT being autobilled (but, like everyone, had to provide a credit card number to open a hosting account) were still automatically debited. Also, there were apparently instances of people who had canceled their account months before being debited. In other words, DH was keeping information they should have destroyed. Moreover, they were keeping it ALL in one place, so no matter what your billing preference (or status as a customer or not), your card was dinged when it came time.

I was an idiot -- I hadn't unchecked the autobill option and was pretty satisfied. Now I don't do anything automatically anymore. But others hosted at Dreamhost hadn't signed up for autobilling and got screwed anyway.

Re:STREWTH

[Knara]

I have to say, I'm really doubtful of the claims that they debited people's accounts that weren't active or not auto-billed. There's a *lot* of folks out there that have hatred for Dreamhost that borders on the fanatical. I see it all the time on dreamhoststatus.com (hell, from people who write to ask for status updates on that blog, when it explicitly says that it is not monitored for questions), and it's always someone who didn't know what they were doing, thinking that $10/mo shared hosting was a proper platform for an uptime-dependant e-business screaming their head off that DH is awful.

I'm not affiliated with DH in any way other than as one of those cheap shared-hosting folks, and I've had nothing but good experiences with DH. Their tech support replies within a few hours (and with no SLA, at that), downtime is minimal for $10/mo, and their maintenance of their oneclicks+updates has been good. I even leave processes (ssh logins, sure) up for days as SSH tunnels and have no problems.

Apparently I'm the one happy DH customer on the entire Intarbutts

Re:STREWTH

[Knara]

I'd mod you up but I've already said the same elsewhere in this thread. Though I'd point out that if you're serious about having an e-business, you really probably want to shell out for something that has an SLA. At least then you have recourse when it's someone else's fault :)

Re:STREWTH

[petermgreen]

did they just add more indexes or did they change the actual structure of the database?

Re:STREWTH

[duncan3dc]

I use heartinternet.co.uk and have nothing but praise for them. I recently decided to give dreamhost a spin and it's not working out well so far...

Re:STREWTH

[Vantage]

I like kualo.. They are UK based.

Kualo.com

Re:STREWTH

[WK2]

They provide everything I would want from a hosting company, such as ssh. Their servers are fast. I don't think their account maintenance interface requires javascript. They don't allow resident programs, but they allow you to run cron scripts. I haven't had any problems with them at all, and their prices are excellent.

A bunch of other companies do weird stuff regarding their hosting. I used a service a while ago, shieldhost. I was happy with them for a while. They provided ssh, and their servers were pretty fast. At some point, they decided to restrict ssh, and required that you send them a photocopy of your Driver's License and Social Security card, IIRC. I spent about an hour researching and diagnosing that problem. I remember thinking, "I'm not going to do that. The only people who won't have a problem are professional identity thieves who probably have boxes of that stuff." Then they got new management, and changed their billing service. They accidentally billed me twice, and I wrote half a dozen trouble tickets to billing in a two week period. Each of those disappeared without explanation. They weren't even "deleted", which would have shown up in the ticket history. I ended up having to get Paypal to give me that money back, and my Credit Card to give me back the other charge. My credit card actually gave me other problems, but that is another story. I withdrew both charges, because that was not an acceptable level of service. The new management also decided to remove all the site documentation, and replace it with a "knowledge base" system. The knowledge base is, to this day (over a year after I dumped them), completely empty.

I've used a few registrars, such as domainsarefree (pretty cheap domains, but not free). Their servers are slow as a snail, and their interface kept failing silently when I tried to enter my contact info. It turns out that they require each field to be in a very specific format. You can enter "California" into the State field, but after hitting submit, it will fail silently, and everything you entered will be lost. I ended up having to change one field at a time, and discover through experimentation what the arbitrary format is. I guess I live in "Ca", not "California". Add to this that it takes about 30 seconds to a minute to submit the form, and it is a serious problem, and not worth the $5 savings over using nearlyfreespeech.net

It's not that nearlyfreespeech is spectacular in any way. It's hosting; it shouldn't be that hard. It's just that the hosting industry is full of bullshit, and nearlyfreespeech has none that I am aware of.

Here are a few potential cons to nearlyfreespeech: To curb spam, nearlyfreespeech limits outgoing mail to 1 per minute, with a 100 mail bucket. This might be a problem for some people. I'm not sure if they will relax this on request, but they might. Also, they require accurate whois info for their registrar service. They said that they would delete accounts with inaccurate info without refund. Their documentation is a bit scattered. It's way above average in regards to completeness, but I've had to use Google to search their site for answers.

Re:STREWTH

[Zixia]

Take a look at Memset Hosting.

Re:STREWTH

[maxume]

Thanks.

Re:STREWTH

[maxume]

In case you missed it:

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=564949&cid=23565195

(In reply to me asking nearly the same question)

Re:STREWTH

[pnutjam]

I am another satisfied nearlyfreespeech.net user, but I don't believe the allow cron, per their FAQ:

What are the most common things that do not work on your system?

Here are the things we are most often asked about that do not work with our service:

* cron (this or a similar feature is on our to-do list)
* FastCGI / SCGI (this is not applicable in our hosting environment, thus we do not offer it and programs written specifically to depend on its API will not work)
* Java Servlets / JSP (we have no plans to add server-side Java support at this time)
* mod_perl, mod_ruby, and mod_python
* Web application frameworks that depend on persistent processes, including: Ruby On Rails, Django, Zope, and others (some of these will run under CGI, but will run slowly and are suitable only for development purposes) It's been suggested that publicly posting information about our technical limitations isn't savvy marketing, but if our service isn't going to work for you, we want you to know that before you sign up if at all possible.

Re:STREWTH

[eck011219]

I hear you, but my buddy who recommended them to me in the first place is one of them. He paid manually, but got dinged for several hundred bucks. His credit card covered it in the short-term and it was ultimately refunded, but it DID happen.

I'm glad you got good tech support from them -- personally, I would often wait more than 72 hours for a response from them. My typical support requests were pretty basic and could have been dealt with and gone pretty quickly. So I don't think triage was the issue -- after several months of intermittent problems it became clear that when I had problems, so went the entire customer base. They were dealing with pretty deep infrastructure issues and telling each customer as they were able that it was isolated to a small group of people and would be fixed soon.

I'm not here to bitch about Dreamhost (though I did bring it up, I suppose). I got myself and all my low-level clients away from them and am a happier man for it, though it cost me a lot of hours and irritation. (I had several minimal-use clients hosted there, and it was surprisingly hard to convince them that for five extra bucks they could get their e-mail and have a website ALL the time.) All I meant to point out was that one of the core features offered by Dreamhost was e-mail, and their eagerness to push its users toward Google mail is totally (and depressingly) in keeping with their surfer-boy demeanor.

Re:STREWTH

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to check out http://www.hostgator.com

Good pricing, reliable servers, their support team is 24/7x7 and if you need any modules installed/more advanced stuff they will do it for you

They are not in the UK but I know several people with dedicated and shared servers at hostgator that reside in the UK and the latency is pretty low

I just prefer...

[cayenne8]

I just prefer to set up and run my own email server from home.

That way, I can handle spam they way I want, set up accounts for friends if need be (or businesses)

At the very least..."I" know who is storing and reading my mail. Me, not some corporation that holds it, reads it to display ads....and turns it over to the govt. at the govt's whim.

Re:I just prefer...

[jeiler]

You can stop the storage company from turning things over to the govt by removing the company from the equation ... but how do you stop the transiting ISPs from turning things over?

Re:I just prefer...

[Nursie]

Ditto, I have a small, low power box with my own setup.

I have control over the whole thing and nobody gets my data.

Re:I just prefer...

[mortonda]

Transiting ISPS would have to snif traffic to catch my email, which is doable but a large task. My email server also has TLS available, and a lot of sites actually do use it... which makes it unsniffable.

Re:I just prefer...

[Nursie]

Use encryption opportunistically, that helps, any comms between known hosts in your web of trust are then impenetrable to anyone but you.

Re:I just prefer...

[Anonymous Coward]

At least I know my ISP isn't required to obey some PATRIOT act and what not...

Re:I just prefer...

[guilheb]

I used to host my own mail but I would stress out everytime power would go out, or if I moved to a new place and took 1-2 days to get back Internet access.

Re:I just prefer...

[OverlordsShadow]

Another reason why I like hosting my own sites and having my own email server. Don't have to worry about what is said or sent over it, except for where the ISP is concerned I guess. I think it could go either way.

Re:I just prefer...

[jeiler]

If I were to use encryption, I would encrypt everything--and would send dummy messages on a regular basis to avoid traffic pattern analysis. The actual process is trivial, but even with strong encryption, if you are being watched and you only encrypt to certain parties, those who watch you will also know who else to watch.

Re:I just prefer...

[Nursie]

Well that's true, but you still have to communicate with parties who don't use encryption, or at least you do if you want a functional, general purpose email system.

Whilst it's not good protection if you've already attracted serious suspicion to yourself, it ought to keep you clear of random traffic scans and any consequences associated with your ISP retaining large quantities of packet logs.

And yes, if you are into doing this fully and properly, you would find a large variety of unrelated hosts that would allow you to form encrypted connections and send dummy messages on a (p)random basis. And receive of course. Then you don't give anyone away and you have a large amount of useless data for a good needle/haystck setup.

Re:I just prefer...

[jeiler]

...you still have to communicate with parties who don't use encryption, or at least you do if you want a functional, general purpose email system.

Off-topic, but there used to be several remailer services who would route emails anonymously. The original email could be encrypted for the end reader, then again for each successive remailer like a letter in a series of envelopes.

One wonders if such services still exist, and if the original "Encrypt to destination reader" could be skipped, resulting in the last remailer decrypting the last "envelope," and the actual recipient receiving clear text.

I haven't messed with encryption and remailers in several years--while it's certainly effective, and while I certainly support those who choose to do so, I don't see the need for it in my life.

Re:I just prefer...

[afabbro]

I prefer it, too, but my spam has been running very high lately, despite SpamAssassin and all its add-ons. Most days my mail is like this:

• 1000 spams are blocked (I just checked and it was 1,013 yesterday)
• 100 spams get through
• 5-10 real messages I have to find in the clutter

Granted, I've had my home email address since 1996ish and back in the day, I posted to USENET a lot with it.

I may switch to Gmail just due to spam overload...sad...

Re:I just prefer...

[pebs]

I just prefer to set up and run my own email server from home.

That way, I can handle spam they way I want, set up accounts for friends if need be (or businesses)

I prefer doing this with a hosted Linux VPS which provides me with as much control as I want over the software, but I don't have to worry about managing the hardware and internet connection, and it is affordable. I used to run my own mail server at home, but internet connection outages and power outages made it much less reliable than a hosted solution.

I used to run various servers on my home machines, but have since moved all those to hosted services (both managed and unmanaged) and it saves me time and reduces my electricity bill since I can suspend/hibernate my machines when I am not using them.

Re:I just prefer...

[Tony Hoyle]

If your power goes out it queues on the backup MX for anything up to a couple of weeks before bouncing. Mail is pretty resilient.

If it was that important they'd SMS or phone you anyway..

Re:I just prefer...

[esconsult1]

Really, the guys who say they host email at home because of wanting to protect their emails are dumb-asses.

The moment you send out an email, it has to land in someone else's mailbox. If you're paranoid, they're plenty of other things to be paranoid about. Email is long past the point of paranoia. You have no control over what happens to the email you send, and what happened to the copy of the email that you received (in the sender's outbox).

Stop being stupid.

Re:I just prefer...

[witherstaff]

Have you updated to the latest spamassassin, or ran one of the all-in-one wonders like clamAV?

Having recently updated clamAV for the office server after having a year out of date install, I was nicely surprised at the near total elimination of spam. This includes using a few accounts over a decade old , usenet, and un-obfuscated on spidered websites.

Re:I just prefer...

[mortonda]

Stop assuming that your are smarter than others.

This thread was talking about email received, not sent, so what you say doesn't apply completely. Sure, the mail is in someone's sent folder, but that's harder to track down if they don't even have a record of who you are conversing with.

Anything that is sensitive I PGP encode.

Besides, I don't host my own email because I'm paranoid about big brother, I host it because I want IMAP access for several of my computers,and the performance is better over a LAN.

I also trust my own backup processes better.

One benefit of hosting your own email is that your bayes filters can get much more accurate as it learns your own email characteristics.

Also, I run my own Maia Mailguard server for testing and it provides test data for it. :)

Re:I just prefer...

[Anonymous Coward]

In Europe, ISPs must log all internet traffic (as well as phone calls and sms messages) for 6 months because of the "terrorism", not thst the Government wants to spy on you.

Of course.

Re:I just prefer...

[cayenne8]

"One wonders if such services still exist, and if the original "Encrypt to destination reader" could be skipped, resulting in the last remailer decrypting the last "envelope," and the actual recipient receiving clear text."

Yes...the 'nym' servers and the like still exist....mixmaster ones too.

Re:I just prefer...

[rastoboy29]

<i>At the very least..."I" know who is storing and reading my mail. Me, not some corporation that holds it, reads it to display ads....and turns it over to the govt. at the govt's whim.</i><p><br>
Except for all the service providers who's links your emails pass over in transit.

Re:I just prefer...

[andyKucharski]

sure... i prefer to build my computers that way i know what type of components I put in it, i prefer to tweak my Kernel, and I prefer to tweak my spam settings to no end... the problem is I have a little problem of having a job and a family...

For home consumers, yes

[rodrigoandrade]

For home consumers, yes. But I've yet to know a serious organization that outsourced its email needs to Gmail, Hotmail, etc. Integration with other systems (Lotus Notes), privacy concerns are just a couple hurdles the free webmail services will have to get past before being widely accepted in corporations.

Re:For home consumers, yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I've yet to know a serious organization that outsourced its email needs to Gmail, Hotmail, etc.

Google did :)

Re:For home consumers, yes

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Possibly not - when I was interviewing there, the recruiters had "@google.com" and not "@gmail.com"...

Re:For home consumers, yes

[Anonymous Coward]

The University of Virignia is in the process of outsourcing all student email to gmail/hotmail (students make the choice). Employee email is in house so far.

Re:For home consumers, yes

[Shakrai]

Possibly not - when I was interviewing there, the recruiters had "@google.com" and not "@gmail.com"...

And what do you think they are using behind the scenes to read/compose/manage their @google.com accounts? Something tells me that it's probably not Exchange.....

Re:For home consumers, yes

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

The same occurred to me; unfortunately know way to know, but I would actually be surprised if it was gmail. I suspect a quick search of some blogs will reveal the answer...

Re:For home consumers, yes

[paitre]

Companies are, however, outsourcing email services to more robust, PAID services that provide fully functional integration with Outlook and Exchange.

Re:For home consumers, yes

[msuarezalvarez]

You'd imagine people handling email for google knows you can use gmail with a different domain...

Re:For home consumers, yes

[Anonymous Coward]

And the chancesthat companies that care about those things would be using dreamhost for their web site and email...

I'm going with 0%.

Re:For home consumers, yes

[Igmuth]

Why wouldn't Google use Google Apps for their internal webmail?

The only reasons I've seen listed in the discussion for other companies not to use google apps are privacy and unprofessional. Privacy: Oh no! Google is can read Google's email! Unprofessional: Oh no! Google email coming from google servers.

Now individual people might dislike the webmail interface, but as a I'm pretty sure the people in charge of Google do like it.

Re:For home consumers, yes

[slthytove]

Do universities count as large organizations? I know Case Western Reserve University does some sort of Google Apps outsourcing, and I believe there are quite a few other universities and liberal arts colleges that do the same.

Re:For home consumers, yes

[ximenes]

Who knows. Yahoo certainly doesn't use Yahoo Mail internally, they use Exchange.

And while I use GMail, it certainly does have some failings that I might not want to bet the entire company on. Its IMAP support for one is a

A company isn't guaranteed to use its own products, especially if their products aren't targeted towards large companies. I did loathe Exchange though.

Re:For home consumers, yes

[xaxa]

Google use the GMail interface and tools.

(At least, according to my flatmate who works at Google and has an @google.com address.)

Re:For home consumers, yes

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Ah, ok; thanks for the reply

Re:For home consumers, yes

[CTachyon]

Actually, Google's pretty big on dogfooding stuff. Google's internal e-mail is most definitely the Google Apps flavor of GMail. Most of the features that Google adds to the public site have been stress-tested by deploying them internally, where Google's tens of thousands of employees can use them, abuse them, and file bugreports.

We switched to gmail.

[jellomizer]

My company switched to useing gmail. Primarly because it is too expensive to keep our mail server running smoothly. The mail server is one of the most volnerable parts on your network, Linux/Unix or not it is a huge security risk. And it needs to be kept up todate constently, Reconfigured spam filters... For a company mail server is very expensive. And if gmail is willing to do this for Free even though we get adds, we end up with a better email service for less costs. We switched and we are getting less Spam, out internet connection speed is better (slightly). And we are getting mail more relabably.
The employees can check their mail remotly. Management is happy they are not getting killed with Spam, and the office can be left uninteded and locked up for Weeks.

Re:We switched to gmail.

[alexo]

My company switched to useing gmail.

For your sake, I hope your company doesn't have any trade secrets.

Re:We switched to gmail.

[harry666t]

> > My company switched to useing gmail.

> For your sake, I hope your company doesn't have any trade secrets.

Or spelling nazis.

Re:We switched to gmail.

[dk.r*nger]

For your sake, I hope your company doesn't have any trade secrets.

For your sake, I hope your company has measures in place so you don't need to ship trade-secrets around via e-mail.

Re:We switched to gmail.

[Snocone]

For your sake, I hope your company doesn't have any trade secrets.

For your sake, I hope you're not stupid enough to think that your company's trade secrets are safe in email that doesn't go through gmail...

Re:We switched to gmail.

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

That's all fine and good for you. However, you do understand that you have no real control over Google's spam filters. Are you sure that Google never throws away a good message?

Perhaps in your business it's OK to potentially miss a message or two every now and then. Where I've worked, we ran our own mail servers and controlled the anti-spam software so if it was too restrictive we could tweak it. We operated on the assumption that it was better to get some spam than to miss real messages. At my last job, we simply could not miss any messages from certain clients and if we had to get a little spam as a result of that, that was something we lived with.

If your company doesn't have the money, time and expertise to run a mail server, I understand. But there's a trade off. Google has copies of your email and can theoretically look at it. I work for a Fortune 500 company and we simply cannot allow another company to have potential access to our email. If Google's network has a meltdown (unlikely, but can anyone say it's impossible?), your mail can't be reached.

Re:We switched to gmail.

[JayAEU]

Where I've worked, we ran our own mail servers and controlled the anti-spam software so if it was too restrictive we could tweak it. [...] we simply could not miss any messages from certain clients [...]. I hope you're aware that email is not suitable for reliable communications. There's so much that can go wrong before the email actually arrives at your mailserver that it's not even funny.

I would like to hear what your procedure was to handle clients that insist that they sent you a message when in fact their message got lost long before your boundary of control.

Re:We switched to gmail.

[AngryNick]

I work for a Fortune 500 company and we simply cannot allow another company to have potential access to our email. If Google's network has a meltdown (unlikely, but can anyone say it's impossible?), your mail can't be reached.

I work for a rather hugemongous company (100,000+ employees) with loads of mail servers and highly paid people to feed and water them. My personal Google Apps email has better uptime and more accurate spam filtering.

I don't see any reason to tether your email hosting to your mail hosting. They serve completely separate business purposes and usually involve complete different admins. I've found the bundling of these services by hosts to be more of a headache than anything else.

Re:We switched to gmail.

[gnuman99]

I would like to hear what your procedure was to handle clients that insist that they sent you a message when in fact their message got lost long before your boundary of control.

I use

    grep /var/log/mail 'source@domain.com' | less

Then if there is no mail, not even mail connection attempts from their domain, then their own outgoing filter destroyed the message.

Email messages don't get 'lost'. They get destroyed on purpose. No competent admin would ever design their own internal system to destroy outgoing mail without notifying the sender that it did so.

Re:We switched to gmail.

[Anonymous Coward]

For your sake, I hope you're not stupid enough to think that your company's trade secrets are safe in email that doesn't go through gmail...

Assuming a secure corporate network than yes, a company's trade secrets are safe in email. The email never makes it out to the internet unless someone forwards it (which is besides the point). Additionally, corporate mail servers can silently encrypt (i.e. no user intervention, the #1 barrier for crypto use) for all internal mails.

Re:We switched to gmail.

[jellomizer]

"Um no I didn't get the message. Let me check... Oh it got misfilted in my Spam folder let me fix it." Google Gmail doesn't delete the bad message it dumps it in Spam so it is not gone.

Re:We switched to gmail.

[jellomizer]

We tend not to pass trade secretes via Email. Like our brand new search method that could make google obsolete. With or without remote email what could stop someone intercepting our email traffic regularly. It is a fairly easy to track and intercept.

Re:We switched to gmail.

[alexo]

For your sake, I hope you're not stupid enough to think that your company's trade secrets are safe in email that doesn't go through gmail...

Is there any reason for them not to be safe on an local, internally administered mail server?

Outgoing email is a different issue altogether.

Re:We switched to gmail.

[Anonymous Coward]

And if gmail is willing to do this for Free even though we get adds, we end up with a better email service for less costs. That's why my company always brings some good cc...

Re:We switched to gmail.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most companies have email originating on the LAN that stays entirely within the LAN and never reaches the net. If you run your own server you can be confident that if you are sending an email to your own domain that it will never touch the ISP's wires.

I'm a Dreamhost customer

[jalefkowit]

... and if they require me to pipe my mail through Google, I'll take my business somewhere that doesn't.

Re:I'm a Dreamhost customer

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure they will miss your $10/year.

Re:I'm a Dreamhost customer

[TheReaperD]

I am also a DreamHost customer. If you feel this way, email them and let them know. Otherwise, they have no way of knowing how you feel. (Even though I suspect a large percentage of DreamHost employees browse Slashdot.

Re:I'm a Dreamhost customer

[Anonymous Coward]

I am also a Dreamhost customer, however I think you are delusional. If you use any shared hosting service for a serious website then you're either a super cheap bastard or just stupid.

I also happen to work for a medium sized webhost and with all the problems we have with e-mail I'd honestly recommend using the Google Apps e-mail service to anyone on shared hosting, if it wasn't (currently) a conflict of interest. Hell even the virtual server people would benefit from it.

Shunt 60% of your bandwidth to Google...

[Electrawn]

... to save on bandwidth costs and spam appliances.Sound business strategy and relieves your email headaches! Until Google gets serious into the webhost business and you just gave them a list of all your customers. Or Googles spam filters start throwing your invoices into the spam folder. GENIUS!

This is why companies never do joint ventures unless forced.

Very professional move

[Vellmont]

The idea that I'm going to be content putting "headhoncho_acme6@gmail.com" on my business card instead is laughable.

Who said anything about gmail.com? Google also provides DOMAIN based hosting of your email. i.e. headhoncho@acme.com can go to Google's servers.

If Dreamhost doesn't want to include email with their web hosting accounts (and it looks like this is the first step towards phasing it out), then they need to get out of the web hosting business

I very much disagree. Web hosting and email hosting have very little to do with each other. They both involve the internet, but beyond that, there's little crossover. Why not let each provider provide what they can do best? I don't eat at gas stations, even though driving across country often involves feeding myself as well as my car. Why should my website host try to also provide poor email?

Re:Very professional move

[shawn(at)fsu]

I agree and this shouldn't come as a surprise right? I mean thats the way everything seems to be going. You contract out what isn't your specialty. Because if it's not your specialty it could very well be costing you more to do it yourself. That's how we have all these IT outsourcing companies.

Re:Very professional move

[Nushio]

I don't eat at gas stations, even though driving across country often involves feeding myself as well as my car.
I do eat at Gas Stations, I eat Burritos. That way both me and my car will be full of gas. :-)

Re:Very professional move

[pizzach]

To put this argument in other terms, just because the serial port is being phased out in place of the newer, easier to use USB port doesn't mean that having a serial port as backup isn't nice too. It gives flexibility.

Re:Very professional move

[Anonymous Coward]

I eat at gas stations, because here in the UK they provide a decent selection of food and it's convenient to be able to do both at once.

The exact same applies to e-mail inclusion with web hosting, it's rather convenient having everything relating to your domain (because that's the common factor here, not the simplification of "the internet" as you put it) in one single place. I'm certain the vast majority of people wanting their own website with their own domain name also want to use e-mail on that domain so it makes sense to have it bundled and packaged together - it's not really as convenient or secure to have to go off to some 3rd party for different services hosted on your domain.

Re:Very professional move

[Vellmont]

I eat at gas stations, because here in the UK they provide a decent selection of food and it's convenient to be able to do both at once.

My point isn't to say some people won't choose convenience over quality, only that providing two vastly different products means that the quality of one of them is going to suffer greatly.

We've seen the opposite

[teknopurge]

We've had more clients sign up with us looking for what they usually call "real" email then anything else in the past 6 months or so. Though we focus on businesses and most clients require some kind of complex hosting solution, a number of small businesses have signed up looking for something other then their current provider, usually either comcast, yahoo or gmail.

I can think of many reasons for Dreamhost to do this, as providing good email service can be difficult, especially with the spammers and various providers implementing their own "standards". I could see SH doing this just to get that monkey off their back...

Regards,

Re:We've seen the opposite

[Anonymous Coward]

OH NO! It's a Network Solutions vampire!

Re:We've seen the opposite

[Tripster]

I agree, we find our clients feel email hosting is as important and for some more important than their website hosting. Set up correctly the email aspect of hosting isn't that tough to provide, while our filters may not be as robust as Gmails (who have a much larger dataset to build filters from) we do manage to keep spam to a minimum, coupled by not overloading the servers and keeping a clean customer base I really find it hard to understand why DH would tell customers to get email hosting elsewhere.

Sounds more like overloaded servers having trouble just keeping up with web services and adding the email (and required SpamAssassin, ClamAV, etc.) on top of that is giving them grief.

Next they'll be telling the clients who only use basic HTML websites to go to Google Pages I suppose.

Not just webmail

[Midnight Thunder]

For me non-webmail is a thing of the past, I love being able to easily access my mail from any computer anywhere (and I'm on quite a lot of different ones on different places). And GMail is the best of all webmails, so they sure made a good choice!

For those who want a bit more than simply webmail, there is also the SMTP and IMAP interfaces offered by GMail.

Re:Not just webmail

[Anonymous Coward]

there is also the SMTP and IMAP interfaces offered by GMail ..except that the IMAP interface is completely broken.

It's a huge "Folders vs Tags" mess. Their webmail supports tags, but IMAP supports folders. Things get messy when their email server attempts to mesh the two.

If you do a full sync, your IMAP client has to download messages multiple times, one for each "folder" ("tag") that is applied to the message. After a little while it becomes horribly frustrating.

Maybe if they concentrated more on

[future assassin]

less massive overselling of their servers for pennies per month, their servers could handle the load properly with out suggesting to the customer that they unload their email service to Google Hosted.

Re:Maybe if they concentrated more on

[teknopurge]

I think you said a ton and didn't even realize it. It makes sense that the next step to overselling is to "streamline" current overhead. This move will only save DH money and increase their profit, for the time being.

Duplicate effort

[jsnipy]

Unless you have an absolute and utter need to stamp out any risk of peering, there is not much need to undertake the effort to do spam filters, maintaining a server, and using bandwidth. With free spop and google apps to use you own domain name, no much convinces me to use anything else

Mailtrust

[kurtmckee]

I pay for and highly recommend Mailtrust. They've treated me very well.

First, do no harm (to another's marketplace)

[NetSettler]

partnering with Google offers DreamHost a way to offload many of its trouble tickets, reducing the support overhead. Is Google starting to make web hosts less necessary?

One of the things I don't like about free software is that it basically pays for itself off the profits of an unrelated industry, eliminating competition in an otherwise viable industry because someone can afford to offer the service for free as a loss leader to other business.

A thing that is especially troublesome is that not only does it basically make it so that no one can afford to be in the business area (software development for money) competing with the free thing (software given away for nothing), but also no one can afford not to use the free thing because the cost of the luxury of buying an alternative brand will be exposed by the market as superfluous if passed along to end users.

It seems to me that if this becomes a trend, it will be the effective continuation of that paradigm shift by Google into another area, and that the logical continuation of this, by analogy, would be that not only can no one afford to compete with Google and other agencies giving away free mail but no one will be able to afford not to use Google's mail.

That would be sad if it turns out that there are reasons why using Google's mail is not a good idea... such as, for example, concerns about privacy.

If Google becomes the standard of mail, the problem is that it can afford to add incidental services in parity with any nuisance it causes, making it impossible for would-be competitors to match on a value-point by value-point basis even if they find a way that should theoretically be able to compete.

Re:First, do no harm (to another's marketplace)

[WK2]

There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of email services. Most of them are free, but you can pay if you want. There is no threat of Gmail being the only email provider in the foreseeable future.

Re:First, do no harm (to another's marketplace)

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm curious which free software has eliminated all competition in its niche? People still pay for web servers, C compilers, and operating systems. Perhaps web browsers. Anything else significant?

Re:First, do no harm (to another's marketplace)

[Sockatume]

In this instance it's hard to argue that GMail is a loss leader. Free email has always been an ad-subsidised product, and GMail is the same. I'm not sure what high-marging goods you think Google is selling which could be subsidising it.

Re:First, do no harm (to another's marketplace)

[homer_s]

...eliminating competition in an otherwise viable industry because someone can afford to offer the service for free as a loss leader to other business.

You should read Bastiat's petition to block out the sun.
You are leaving out the benefits to the end user due to the cheap/free software. It is the classic "Seen vs Unseen".(Of course, if your point about "profiting off an unrelated industry" is true, then it is theft and hence wrong. But I don't believe that that is true.)

but also no one can afford not to use the free thing because the cost of the luxury of buying an alternative brand will be exposed by the market as superfluous if passed along to end users.

Yes. That is a feature, not a bug.
Either the alternative brand has some value, which end users will pay for or its value is not worth anything and the end users are not willing to pay for it.

The mistake you are making is that you value competition for its own sake. Competition (and producers) exist only for the sake of the end consumer. If the consumer can obtain what he wants for a low cost or for free, then there is no need for competition or producers.
This is also the mistake people make when they argue against free-trade and monopolies.

Re:First, do no harm (to another's marketplace)

[tobiasly]

A thing that is especially troublesome is that not only does it basically make it so that no one can afford to be in the business area (software development for money) competing with the free thing (software given away for nothing), but also no one can afford not to use the free thing because the cost of the luxury of buying an alternative brand will be exposed by the market as superfluous if passed along to end users.

Correct, "software development for money" is dead. That's a very astute observation, but you're several years late in making it. Selling support for software is the new business model; see: Red Hat, MySQL, Canonical.

Those who realize this truth and embrace it fully will prosper. Those who still cling to business models of the past will be eliminated. It sounds like you're still on the wrong side of the issue; I strongly encourage you to reevaluate your position soon.

Re:First, do no harm (to another's marketplace)

[gnuman99]

no one can afford to be in the business area (software development for money) competing with the free thing (software given away for nothing)

As a software developer AND user of free software AND payer of licensing money for stuff like Qt and Microsoft MSDN, I have to say this is not true.

GPL doesn't mean for-free. Consultants get paid $$$ to add features needed. Maintenance contracts are there too. And many people would like to pay $40 to make sure their software is supported and their feedback listened to. Free-software is NOT the panacea that many would like you to believe. If upstream disappears from a project, then what?
Happened already on a few free projects we use. Being one's own upstream can cost a lot more than $50.

While you are correct that free email like gmail or hotmail made paid-for mail services to customers almost obsolete, it did not make mail servers and their support obsolete. Majority of businesses run their own mail infrastructure for good reasons I will not get into here.

Re:First, do no harm (to another's marketplace)

[Bluesman]

That doesn't make any sense. How would it ever cost someone more than a few bucks a month to run a mail server, especially if the software is free?

Unless you're asking whether Google can leverage their monopolistic synergy in complex pattern matching to reduce the cost-value proposition point of market-bearing alternatives, such that the price value point being undercut to the nearest mean root square alternative minimum price loci doesn't move toward the market's natural game theoretic area of convergence, which would be a bad thing for both the customer and the poor, oblivious Slashdot reader trying to figure out what the hell we're talking about.

Re:First, do no harm (to another's marketplace)

[The End Of Days]

For a dead business, there sure are a few billion dollars being made doing it. I think maybe you oughta look outside your cubbyhole for a few minutes and realize the world doesn't quite match your perception.

Re:First, do no harm (to another's marketplace)

[psydeshow]

Customers will pay for customized implementation of fee services and software. Many will go with one-sized-fits-all solutions, 'strue, but busy people without general tech knowledge or a lot of time on their hands will hire someone smart to "just make it work".

This marketplace encourages cooperation over competition.

Re:First, do no harm (to another's marketplace)

[NetSettler]

but also no one can afford not to use the free thing because the cost of the luxury of buying an alternative brand will be exposed by the market as superfluous if passed along to end users.

Yes. That is a feature, not a bug. Either the alternative brand has some value, which end users will pay for or its value is not worth anything and the end users are not willing to pay for it.

The mistake you are making is that you value competition for its own sake.

And the mistake you are making is that you think that things that competition does not value are not of value. Competition is not sentient and functions only when proper assignments of dollar value have been created. It is possible to badly assign dollar values to things and in so doing to create situations in which competition will kill things of value as, for example, it might be argued is occurring with things like global warming, where a competitive market is seeking various earth-unfriendly situations because the dollar value of having a world that continues to function correctly has not been appropriately assigned. So please don't imply that the God of Competition is all-knowing about what is good and right and proper in the world without adequately investigating the complete assignment of human value to dollar value.

I'll take a neutral point: Let's say we believe that there is intrinsic human decency value to health care, and yet there are companies in the world who don't pay it. What we will find (and are finding) is that the market will seek supply from those who are in the market at the least cost. In some cases, we can suppose, there's the theoretical possibility that these remote locations to which jobs and businesses are moving offer equivalent health care and other standard of living to what the US offers, and perhaps in those cases what it's saying is that the US simply charges more than it needs to in order to provide these things. But certainly it is the case that in some cases, one reason the cost is lower in those other places is that there is not health care (or not at the same level) or there is not environmental regulation (or not at the same level). Competition will squeeze that out as a luxury because the person buying the sneakers or the iPod or the toaster or whatever doesn't think they're buying someone health care or buying the world the right to survive climate change--they just selfishly want cheaper products without regard to any of that.

And so if I own a company where I would like to offer better health care to my employees, I may not be able to afford to because my competition does not and I cannot compete without offering the lowest of what anyone else does or that cost of my "indulging" my employees with good health care will show through to my product. But that is not to say that that health care had no value. The problem is that in a layered product world, value occurs at different levels and value at one level is not always tolerated at another, so that platitudes like your (repeated for emphasis)

Either the alternative brand has some value, which end users will pay for or its value is not worth anything and the end users are not willing to pay for it.

do not hold up. The fact is that if I have a company where my employees really will be "happier" using a commercial piece of software internally, but if it won't crank out a better end-product, the competitive marketplace rates the value of the employee happiness at zero. And so you're quite right that the market will crank that out.

But what you're wrong about is that there is no loss in the process. Because in the end, taken to its extreme, competition is capable of cranking out all fun and happiness from all the world in the name of serving people better. But if no one is having any fun or happiness, to what end is that?

I think we should build soci

Re:First, do no harm (to another's marketplace)

[nanostuff]

You're making me feel guilty for breathing without having someone charge me for it. Think of the capital that can be created by monetizing oxygen consumption.

Re:First, do no harm (to another's marketplace)

[petermgreen]

And many people would like to pay $40 to make sure their software is supported and their feedback listened to.
Do you really belive $40 will buy you that? It might buy you a few hours from a bottom level support drone and/or put you marginally in front of the freeloaders in the bug report system but it certainly isn't going to ensure you will be listened to in any meaningfull sense.

Re:First, do no harm (to another's marketplace)

[homer_s]

You cite two faults of the free market system and I'll try to answer each one.

It is possible to badly assign dollar values to things and in so doing to create situations in which competition will kill things of value as, for example, it might be argued is occurring with things like global warming, where a competitive market is seeking various earth-unfriendly situations because the dollar value of having a world that continues to function correctly has not been appropriately assigned.

The term is 'negative externality'. This is not a new concept that you have stumbled upon. And at its core, this is a property rights issue. Except that instead of an individual owning the property, a group of people collectively own it.
And just like you would object to your neighbour dumping garbage into your backyard, the people collectively object to someone dumping chemicals into the river. A free market is dependent on ownership of property and the scenario you describe, far from discrediting market based economies, only strengthens it.

And so if I own a company where I would like to offer better health care to my employees, I may not be able to afford to because my competition does not and I cannot compete without offering the lowest of what anyone else does or that cost of my "indulging" my employees with good health care will show through to my product.

You are correct. The consumer/market does not care if you pay your employees well, "take care" of them, etc. It completely ignores that aspect and does not place any value on it.
But this seems a problem to you only because you consider only what you can see - like the cat in the proverb, you think that just because you cannot see something it does not exist.
What you do not see and hence do not consider, is another market which does value things like health care, fair treatment, workplace amenities, etc. This of course, is the labour market. And just like the market for the product of a business, this too is a market where people have to compete for scarce resources.
So, while I as a consumer, may greedily want goods for the lowest cost and would not care about things like slave labour, health care, etc, the other market for labour counters my greed with its own.

You seem to view the employer-employee relationship as a paternalistic one where employers have to "take care" of the employees.
I'm only 29 and I've seen this worldview destroyed in my hometown in India. In the 1980s, I've seen mill owners fight with labour unions about worker pay and benefits. I've seen disputes get ugly and end in violence.
Since the economic liberalization in 1992, I've seen labour become scarcer and scarcer to the point where known "union busters" are offering perks upon perks - free housing, on-site healthcare & free transportation - to lure workers.
Workers who had to slave for hours and hours to afford basic goods now command salaries that were unthinkable 15 years ago. And the same marketplace that "exploits workers" has no choice but to pay them what they want.
All of this happenned not because some bureaucrat suddenly came upon "social systems and economic paradigms and value systems that lead to outcomes like happiness and fun", but because people were given the freedom to run their businesses as they please and produce what they want.

So, "social systems and economic paradigms and value systems that lead to outcomes like happiness and fun" does exist and has brought immense wealth to the world in the past 300 years. The only problem now is the people who seem hell-bent on reversing this period of unprecendent prosperity based on their unbelievable vanity and smugness.

Re:First, do no harm (to another's marketplace)

[NetSettler]

I'm curious which free software has eliminated all competition in its niche? People still pay for web servers, C compilers, and operating systems. Perhaps web browsers. Anything else significant?

<tongue-in-cheek>

Nope, you've pretty much enumerated the entire space of things anyone would want to make out of software and certainly that they might have wanted to receive money for. Moreover, now that you've prodded me to think on it further, I realize there's no chance that anyone would ever have wanted to make software of some other kind than you've enumerated and yet has then declined to make such software because of the likelihood that an immediate free-software knockoff made by a free software "sniper" might undercut their investment. So, upon reflection, I stand corrected. Sorry for any confusion.

</tongue-in-cheek>

By the way, the point of my original post was about Google, and my mention of free software was only incidental. I've replied here in fun so as not to ignore your post, but I plan not to carry this further and have declined my otherwise-automatic karma bonus on this post as a self-imposed penalty for drifting even this far off topic.

And so it begins.

[Anonymous Coward]

When big hosters can't stem the spam avalanche anymore and refer their users to someone else, the message is clear: Email is dying.

And the Big Brother dream comes true

[Janos421]

Remember all the discussion about Gmail privacy policy? The main argument of Gmail defenders was "If you don't like it, don't use it". Now that Gmail is widely adopted it seems that you'll have to use it whether you like it or not. GoodBye privacy...
By the way, if you don't like Google Health privacy policy, don't use it...

it's all about the SPAM...

[timjones]

I'm a very small webhost provider (< 20 domains), and for me, it was a no brainer to get all my customers to get GMail for Domains, point all their MX records to Google, and wash my hands of the SPAM. I use it for all my personal domains as well. Google does a far better job of SPAM filtering than I ever could with SpamAssassin and the blacklists thing... and for this small set of users (< 50 people total), it just wasn't worth it. My tech life got a lot easier when I decided I wasn't going to mess with email anymore, just like the day I decided I was going to ignore Microsoft's APIs. Both are losing propositions in the extreme. So, for me, Google is a VERY useful partner. And I like their web/chat interface too, both the browser version and the mobile edition, which I access from my Treo 650.

Re:it's all about the SPAM...

[brad-x]

My tech life got a lot easier when I decided I wasn't going to mess with email anymore, just like the day I decided I was going to ignore Microsoft's APIs. Both are losing propositions in the extreme. This is ridiculous. Blocking spam is not so impossible as to warrant outsourcing. I am sick of IT professionals outsourcing their tasks because they lack the talent to implement solutions on their own. Either swim with the big fish or get out of the pond.

Re:it's all about the SPAM...

[SaDan]

I'll second that! Anyone in IT who folds like a lawn-chair at the prospect of running an email server needs to seriously reconsider their career path.

Stuff like Zimbra makes managing email incredibly easy these days. There's no excuse to outsource something like email.

Re:it's all about the SPAM...

[xilet]

I would rather admins admit when they are out of their area and go for a workable outside solution rather then just trying to suck it up and force an incomplete solution that probably does not meet the needs and is often not properly maintained.
How many of the corporate spam zombies you see out there do you think are due to that mentality?

Re:it's all about the SPAM...

[Anonymous Coward]

I did the same for a bit over 400 domains.

And I use the domain registrar for name servers. The less I have to manage and run, the more time I have to do things that actually bring in revenue.

Ideally, I'll be able to "out-source" MySQL, Apache, php, backups etc eventually and just be in the content business and let all the little headaches that waste time be handled for free (or nearly free) by someone else.

Re:it's all about the SPAM...

[Archangel Michael]

There's no excuse to outsource something like email. Yes, there is. Just because you can't think of it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I can fully manage an email server, and have done so since near the beginning. However, I would rather NOT have to spend any time dealing with customer's spam questions OR the overhead of Spam on my network.

One of the things that most people are annoyed with, is valuable bandwidth being eaten by Spam. If I can offload this to GOOGLE, for nothing, it is a cost savings to me. I can provide more and better service to my customer base. It means I don't have to have one machine dedicated to email because of the volume of spam coming in.

You see, it isn't about "Geek Cred" for me. I've been there, done that, I don't need any more "cred". It is about service to my customers, and GOOGLE provides better service (Web, IMAP, POP3), and offloads congestion to their own network ... for free.

I suspect you've never had to deal with real paying customers for your living, especially when you think it is all about Geekdom.

Re:it's all about the SPAM...

[dodobh]

It isn't ridiculous to outsource mail hosting. Blocking spam is difficult, and users whine about even single spam messages coming in. It isn't about how much you block, but how much lands in the users inbox.

The big fish also callously do not respond to spam issues for mail coming from smaller providers. It's just more economical to outsource, rather than lose money on mail hosting.

Re:it's all about the SPAM...

[SaDan]

Yeah, yeah, bla bla bla

Sorry, but I've been dealing with email for over 10 years, both paid professionally for SysAdmin work, and through personal business I conduct outside of my normal job. Email is not difficult. SPAM is not difficult. People pay me money specifically because places like Google and people like you can't or won't support their email needs.

Nothing is for free, have fun learning that one on your own. :-)

Re:it's all about the SPAM...

[Archangel Michael]

So, what you're saying is that spam clogging your network doesn't cost you anything. Great, you're not allowed to complain about spam at all anymore. Ever!

And I've been doing Email longer than you, and still am doing it. Spam is easily filtered yes, and managing email isn't hard, yes. The statement provided was as follows

There's no excuse to outsource something like email. The answer, yes there is an excuse, even if you continue to deny it. That excuse is costly bandwidth usage by Spam. If I can re-route that bandwidth to someone else, for no cost to me, and my customer prefers it and doesn't mind ... then why not? Because of some sort of "geek cred"?

I have better things to worry about.

Re:it's all about the SPAM...

[Anonymous Coward]

My tech life got a lot easier when I decided I wasn't going to mess with email anymore, just like the day I decided I was going to ignore Microsoft's APIs. Both are losing propositions in the extreme. This is ridiculous. Blocking spam is not so impossible as to warrant outsourcing.

I am sick of IT professionals outsourcing their tasks because they lack the talent to implement solutions on their own. Either swim with the big fish or get out of the pond. Uhh, he's got 50 users; he's not big fish material.

Re:it's all about the SPAM...

[SaDan]

I'm not complaining about SPAM. I'm complaining about people like you who apparently know so much, you can't be bothered to do anything. Just fork it of to some other company, no problem!

If you've been doing email for so long, why quit now? It's certainly not getting harder!

I'll stand by the statement I made, because it's 100% true. The benefits of running your own email system far outweigh the inconvenience of being responsible for your company's data.

Oh, wait, that's a benefit too.

Re:it's all about the SPAM...

[SaDan]

Wow, a competent sysadmin telling it like it is gets modded as a "Troll"?

I suppose some of you think Google should wipe your ass and mow your lawn as well?

Re:it's all about the SPAM...

[Lijemo]

This is ridiculous. Blocking spam is not so impossible as to warrant outsourcing. I am sick of IT professionals outsourcing their tasks because they lack the talent to implement solutions on their own. Either swim with the big fish or get out of the pond.

Yeah! And I bet he's not even writing his own OS, but wimping out and using a pre-exiting version of Linux or something. And he's probably using Apache, and not even writing his own web-server. And don't get me started so-called-geeks today who can't even be bothered to write their own kernal!

Running a business is about more than posturing for macho geek cred. Just because you can do something, doesn't necessarily mean that doing it yourself is the most effective or cost-efficient solution.

Re:it's all about the SPAM...

[foxylad]

It's not ridiculous! He did exactly what you suggested - got out of the pond.

I did too - same position, small number of email accounts took up an inordinate amount of time configuring spam filtering for whatever the next trick the spammers came up with. Then I noticed GMail's spam filtering was far better than any combination of greylisting, baysian filtering and black listing I could come up with, and with no training. Bye bye, pond!

It's the "IT professionals" that still insist on swimming round a more and more polluted pond that are ridiculous.

Re:it's all about the SPAM...

[Anonymous Coward]

As a small webhost provider, you're not worth anything to your customers if you're not doing their mail, and they'll soon realize this and be done with you.

Using Gmail, no matter what the fanboys in here say, makes you look bad, and it will make your users look bad. Given Gmail's bad reputation in the email community, you can be sure it's going to burn you both.

Re:it's all about the SPAM...

[sciencewhiz]

Does the gmail mobile app support GMail for Domains yet? When I was researching it 6 months ago, that seemed to be the biggest complaint.

Re:it's all about the SPAM...

[timjones]

It isn't ridiculous... blocking SPAM with open source tools is definitely doable. It just isn't worth MY time.

Piss away your time if you like, but I have better things to do.

Re:it's all about the SPAM...

[timjones]

Yes, GMail for domains includes the very same mobile interface that regular GMail does. I access mine via Treo 650p all the time, and it just rocks!

WHAT'S THE DEAL

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, what's the deal with the new popup ads here? It's annoying, and unnecessary, eventhough Opera blocks them.

I was quite okay with the regular ads here. A picture now and then I don't mind seeing, and sometimes even clicked them if I thought they were interresting. Started blocking ads when the video ads started appearing, so that was kind of a bad move, because with the block, it automatically also blocked the stationary ads, and can't make any money on what you don't see. Now it's getting even more annoying with the popups. Kill that shit slashdot. Why the fuck do you guys think that we slashdotters always complain about not linking an article to the print page? Hint: It's not because we like ads and popups and shit. You're alienating your own viewers here!!

Why, slashdot! You're better than that!

Re:WHAT'S THE DEAL

[Anonymous Coward]

hahahaha... been watching much porn? or going to software crack sites? cause YOU GOT A VIRUS SUCKER! perhaps you should dump windows and use something more secure

Re:WHAT'S THE DEAL

[Anonymous Coward]

So you don't know what you're talking about. Thy are forgiven for that.

Thing is, if it were a virus or malware, the popup url wouldn't be slashdot.org, but adsense.com or some exotic url or whatever. I'm not some IT-illiterate like some here, and not all slashdot articles have these pop-up ads. Probably only a few, and they circle in a seemingly random fashion, like regular ads circulate between the sun and HP ads and shit. You'll might encounter one aswell one day in the future (unless they turned them off coincidentally with me writing this).

free hosting of my domain and its services? sure..

[coreconcern]

other than the potential privacy issues that could come up with some people i really had no qualms moving my home-hosted services over to google. they've got more bandwidth than even my business class cable could offer, and their apps aren't that bad. for a small company or a personal domain i don't see anything wrong with having a free option. i think that it indeed encroaches on hosting companies. for some small shops this is their bread and butter. google is giving it away free. something i hadn't seen another company offer until them. is any other companies offering anything similar now?

Natural move

[cephah]

In an industry with as much competition as the web hosting companies experience it's natural to specialize in doing one thing, and doing it good. If they feel they're unable to provide an adequate mail service I'd much rather have them blankly admit it and recommend someone who specializes in that department. My trust in this company has just gone up a notch.

Dreamhost is incorrect.

[snarfies]

1) I have run websites for three different local anime clubs over the years. In all cases I wanted a webhost that had pre-installed mailing list software (mailman preferred, but I'd go for whatever). A lot of webhosts may or may not offer mailing lists, they don't specify - that also means they lose, do not want.

2) I said this before in a largely-unrelated story, but I'll say it again here because its relevant: I own otakubell.com, and its primary purpose (nowadays) is email. Its my server, its my domain (registered through an independent registrar, not tied to the hosting). I don't have to worry about Yahoo or Google suffering a security breach. I don't have to worry about them mining my email for advertising data. And I certainly have a hell of a lot less spam (my Yahoo email account gets HUNDREDS of spam messages every week). If the webhost screws up, I can point my domain elsewhere (hit upon routhost a few years ago, have been quite satisfied). You, on the other hand, are stuck if Google or Yahoo screw up.

Re:Dreamhost is incorrect.

[BIGELLOW]

I think everyone is stuck on the "Gmail" part and thinking "gmail.com" or "googlemail.com". What Dreamhost is suggesting ISN'T for people to use those domains, but to use their own domains. Only, instead of pointing the MX records of their domains at Dreamhosts email servers, to point them at Google's email servers. With this being said, who do you expect to screw up more often? Dreamhost? Your webhost? Or Google? If you trust your own webhost or Dreamhost more than Google, by all means stick with what you trust. But so far, Google has had a pretty good track record for uptime, reliability and general service level. You say that "[you] are stuck if Google or Yahoo screw up". How so? Would you not also be "stuck" if your webhost screws up? If Google screws up, then just point your domain elsewhere. In this sense, it just makes Google like any other webhost (when it comes to an email system.) The difference is, Google shows ads in the webmail interface and, as a result, their service is free. Others don't show ads and charge monthly. Others insert ads into your emails, which is absolutely terrible in my opinion. This is why I will stick with Google for my email and IMAP for my method of retrieving and reading my email.

Dreamhost Support?

[vvaduva]

So they are trying to kill two birds with one stone? Offload their email traffic to someone else and suck less with their support? Sounds like a good business plan...it doesn't mean it will necessarily work.

the problem is spam

[Dr. Tom]

The main cause of those trouble tickets is spam. If spam didn't exist email would be cake to do. As it is, spam is difficult to deal with, and the larger, more central sites can do a much more effective job of dealing with it. Of course some people prefer to deal with it themselves. Do you?

Is Google starting to make web hosts unnecessary?

[xoundmind]

(Thank God) I am no longer in the web development world and have moved on to more stable/interesting work, but... This would seem to depend on how many small/medium scale web shops are still out there. Ones that don't actually host, but tend to push their customers to a single/reliable hosting source for AMP setups. I don't see cloud computing cutting into that market arrangement in the near future, but let's hear from some folks who are slogging away in that end of the biz....It seems like they would know.

One step closer to replacement

[kiehlster]

I hate email and seeing ISPs phasing out email in favor of larger corporate solutions always brings me closer to the edge of my seat for the day when email is replaced by a superior service. Google's offering millions to the first commercial space flight. Why not offer a reward for something practical like a replacement email protocol? I don't care if it lacks backwards compatibility. I just want to see the days of spam end and the days when the food product is the first thing that comes to mind when 'spam' is mentioned. I'm sure Hormel would love that day as well.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Could this have anything to do with....

[Anonymous Coward]

About two months ago, one of their email servers (Blingy) started having problems. Email (at least imap) was completely down, and they sid they would have it back up within a day or so.

That day lasted two weeks. Technically the email was back up before that but barely accessible during working hours for the whole time.

See...

http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2008/03/27/filer-problems-with-blingy-cluster/

I agree with both sides!

[certain death]

I ran an ISP for several years, and now I run a hosting company. We provide email via Zimbra on Grid based servers. Using the grid has eliminated hardware bottlenecks and using Zimbra has eliminated issues with email. When I owned the ISP email was the bane of our existence. If the server went down, EVERYONE screamed like little gurlz yelling about how they depended on our free email to do business. My infamous quote was...if you depend on email to do business, you need a business class email server, not some free add on provided by your hosting company or ISP.

Playing with fire

[AppyPappy]

I set up my wife with a free email account which she used for sending emails to Cub Scouts, Girl Scouts, etc. After a few years, they canceled her account for spamming. I thought I would never hear the end of that. She still brings it up.

If you have a free account, don't expect a whole pile of customer support. If they decide to cancel some VP's account, it just sucks to be you.

Re:Playing with fire

[mrsmiggs]

A high volume of seemingly unsolicited email sent through any email domain is going to cause problems such as being blacklisted and filtered, at least Google will keep a track of this for you and stop unscrupulous activity on your domain. If you're truly a Mom and Pop operation then you can just go ahead and create a Yahoo (or Google) group and make sure everything has open opt-in and opt-out options.

For me the biggest problem with Google mail would be that you don't have access to the underlying databases so if you ever want to move away from that platform the migration is going to be one hell of a mess especially if you want to hang onto your existing emails.

Re:Playing with fire

[seifried]

Uhmm no. You can access it via IMAP or POP which makes it pretty trivial to suck everything out (basically limited to bandwidth speed). Scripting this with a few lines of your favorite scripting language wouldn't exactly be rocket science (connect to IMAP-SSL port, login, for i in * do download $i, done). This is one reason I moved all my stuff ot GMail, they are relatively easy to bail out on (suck out your email, change MX records, done).

Re:Playing with fire

[cerberusss]

I think you're confusing issues here. Of course GMail or any other mail hoster can cancel an account, but that doesn't mean anything in the long term. Ssince you own the domain. You just create a new account at another host, point your MX records to said host and continue using the mail address.

Of course, if you don't have backups then that's just too bad.

Re:Playing with fire

[ProfessionalCookie]

We send out [lots of] reservation confirmations via smtp.gmail.com and use it on our domain for all company email. Gmail's app service is designed for this. Their limits are explicitly stated but as long as you fall into the TOS you're good to go.

Registration for using your domain asks question like "how many users in your organization?" This isn't personal email revisited- this is deployed managed free small business email.

It's excellent.

Should have partnered...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they would have been wise to partner with Google and transparently offer GMail as their bundled email service. That would have made this easier and more transparent to the customer (even if they knew they were using GMail.)

Dreamhost is $7.95/month for UNLIMITED domains

[sputnikid]

I have a Dreamhost account and I pay $7.95 a month.

With that I have the ability to host as many domains as I want and get a TON of bandwidth (4TB/month) to use and a huge amount of disk space (250 GB). I don't use their email servers as I have little use for them (I have used gmail all along).

If one is that concerned about their email service they are more than welcome to go elsewhere and leave Dreamhost for the majority that don't care about email hosting.

its finally end

[GIS.thrills]

this is great. now i can have all my gmail as well as all my company email in the hands of lord google. now when is my beta gparcel service going to get here?

Dreamhost

[br00tus]

I read Dreamhost's message. Let's put argument aside for a moment and say the only thing they should do well is web hosting.

Here is an uptime I just did on their server -

$ uptime
07:15:21 up 22 days, 2:43, 4 users, load average: 7.05, 5.09, 4.96
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep processor
processor : 0
processor : 1

This is quite typical for them. My web sites are on a two processor system, which means the load average shouldn't really go above 2, yet it is above 7 currently, and this is quite common. Sometimes the load is even higher, and my website goes down to a crawl. I wrote a script to monitor the load every minute, but they killed it. They kill my script, but they are not killing whatever is sending the load to way over what it should be (7 is low, it goes higher often). I can't see what sends it over as they limit my ps abilities. I have sent this to the notification of their tech people several times over the past few years, to little effect. Only when it gets mind numbingly slow for long periods of time and I begin complaining over and over and over do they tell me they're going to move me to another server or the like, and then it goes to the usual high load and spike until months down the road where it crawls all the time cycle.

Nonetheless, for the $160 a year I pay it is OK. When I was looking for places to host my site for $160 or so a year, this was one of the handful people said was OK. Aside from their processors always being overloaded double and triple what they should be, and more than that every so often, they have been OK. It is better they are upfront about not offering whiz-bang mail to medium/large sized businesses, one of the good things about Dreamhost is they are not trying to BS their customers like a lot of places.

Re:Dreamhost

[mariushm]

$ uptime
  08:44:17 up 6 days, 23:21, 5 users, load average: 4.74, 4.86, 6.09

I've recently decided not to continue using Dreamhost for 5 small sites I have, it's just not worth it.

I've recently bought a domain and created a small site using Gallery2 for my sister, to upload some photos she took on her holiday.

When I tried to move ten pictures to an album, the script crashed, it failed to move all ten selected files due to the server load.

I mean come on, when 70% of the time the servers are so overloaded that simple operations are not possible....

Yes, you pay 12$ for a month, but for the same price there are companies that don't overload the servers so much.

Re:Dreamhost

[chris462]

I can do one better.

$ uptime
09:06:17 up 20 days, 9:36, 8 users, load average: 7.85, 6.46, 4.59

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor
processor : 0
processor : 1
processor : 2
processor : 3

... and on a different box:

$ uptime
09:07:33 up 65 days, 18:52, 4 users, load average: 3.75, 4.98, 3.47

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor
processor : 0
processor : 1

I've been fed up with DH for a while, but this is the final straw. I'll be moving all of my sites in the near future (as soon as I find a host that I can afford with the features that I need) and canceling my DH accounts.

Re:Dreamhost

[corsec67]

$ uptime
08:01:13 up 7 days, 23:09, 11 users, load average: 29.42, 20.77, 13.91
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor
processor : 0
processor : 1

I don't use DH for anything but completely static pages. And even then the downtime is not insignificant.

Re:Dreamhost

[Anonymous Coward]

One now:

10:08:45 up 6 days, 13:45, 3 users, load average: 8.73, 9.80, 9.54

The web host itself isn't slow even with high load averages with static pages. The problem is with things like WordPress other software that requires DB access. That is when I notice the speed problems.

Re:Is Google starting to make web hosts unnecessar

[teknopurge]

We've gotten more attrition from yahoo, msn, google, etc. over the past 12 months then in the prior 4 years.

Take that for what it's worth.

Kind Regards,

Gmail - a natural extension of Postini

[zerofoo]

A few comments seem to suggest that using gmail for your business is "unprofessional".

Gmail can host email for your domain. You manage your domain, Gmail hosts your mail - most people will not realize that your email is kept at Gmail's servers.

This product grew out of the Postini merger. Many, many companies use Postini for "front-end" email security and filtering. Your domain's MX records point to Postini's mail servers. Postini receives your mail, scans it, filters it, and then delivers it to your mail servers. I've used Postini's service in the past, and it is an awesome service.

The only difference with Gmail is that the mail now is not forwarded to your mail server, it is kept at Gmail.

Unprofessional? Hardly.

-ted

Re:Gmail - a natural extension of Postini

[SaDan]

I think most people in IT who have half a clue and can manage to run a company email server are considering the prospect of outsourcing to GMail unprofessional, not the idea of having GMail host a domain in general.

When set up properly, an email server pretty much sits in the data center and "just works". Having total control over the email server is also important, depending on what your company does, and whether you are subject to any type of audits from an outside source.

I take pride in the work I do, not what I can outsource.

Re:Gmail - a natural extension of Postini

[paugq]

You are wrong. Google data centers fulfill the EU Safe Harbor Directive, as stated in the Safe Harbor homepage at the US Department of Commerce Export site. It's perfectly safe for EU companies to have their data stored in Google's servers.

Re:Gmail - a natural extension of Postini

[mattwarden]

It is not necessarily a good thing that people emailing you have no idea that their emails are being stored on Gmail's servers. My company would never use Gmail because sensitive data is sent all the time internally through email (that may not be wise, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be less wise to include a third-party archive of all emails...). I'm sure it cuts both ways where we wouldn't be extremely happy if one of our clients was storing all emails we sent to them on Gmail's servers.

Re:Gmail - a natural extension of Postini

[NDPTAL85]

If you have a large enough number of clients then one of them IS using Gmail so what are you going to do about it?

When does paranoia become paralysis?

Re:Gmail - a natural extension of Postini

[Anonymous Coward]

You can repeat it as much as you like, but it's not going to magically make Gmail not make your business look bad. The first time there's a problem or Gmail gets blacklisted for continually thumbing its nose at everyone else in the mail community, those who've gone over there will learn what a mistake it is to put your buisiness into some bottom of the barrel casual email service provider.

Re:Gmail - a natural extension of Postini

[mattwarden]

Thanks, but that doesn't change my point at all...

Re:I'm a Dreamhost customer (too)

[keko_metal]

I'm a Dreamhost customer too. They were doing an insight analysis in that post, not recommending or forcing anyone to move to gmail.

Dreamhost is a great service. They allow you to setup all your email in a gmail account, using your own domain, with a few clicks in their custom web panel (so no son_of_the_devil_666@gmail.com problems here)

If you disagree or want something different, they have a voting poll. If your idea is good and get enough votes, they'll implement it in a near future... for no charge. Having tried several hosts in the last years, I'm pretty happy with them.

Google is an evil monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes Google is trying to make web hosting companies a thing of the past. Google is an evil monopoly with one of the worst privacy records in the history of American corporations. They will take as much of every market as possible. For some reason they are allowed to get away with this by throwing a few crumbs to open source projects and charities here and there.

Said it before

[Colin Smith]

Google is the start of the factrification of the IT sector, they are the new Arkwrights.

It's basically an IT factory, providing the same service to hundreds of millions. Where smaller scale and family businesses might have performed those particular services before. Have a look at what happened during the Industrial Revolution for an example of what's coming. I'm sure there will even be some new age Luddites protesting against the changes.

It's simply the economics of increasing availabilty of bandwidth.

Re:Said it before

[psydeshow]

Have a look at what happened during the Industrial Revolution for an example of what's coming. Unionize now!

Gmail is great except for....

[Prisoner's Dilemma]

Gmail sounds on the surface like a good idea. However, there are a critical items why I'll never use it beyond a disposable email account.

First of all, what about when you have a problem. Have you ever tried to get help from Google. Their customer service is non-existent. If you follow their 'contact us' links it funnels you into an FAQ. If you do find the form to contact them (like finding an exit in a casino), you're lucky to get a reply (They openly state they will ignore any correspondence that might be in their FAQ) it's just a form email answering some other question. It may take several iterations (each taking a day or two) of explaining that they didn't answer your question. That's on the off hand chance you can finally get to someone.

If it would cause you problems to have an interruption to your email, you might want to consider this.

Second, Google uses information from your email 'for your benefit' so they can advertise more effectively. What other ways might they decide to leverage it? The idea of Google having access to all of a companies email sounds like a stage for problems.

Third, depending on how international you are, what if some foreign government or other entity, requests your emails? We hear about some public cases, but the probability is good that there are a lot more we don't hear about.

Fourth, take it out of context for a moment. Google's better UI aside, what if the company was Yahoo or AOL?

Twist of words?

[smoothdogg00]

Seems like a twist of words, considering above they said "...email providers like Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google can do better." I'm not sure how this translates into them suggesting customers to use only gmail.

Hmmm....

[andrewmin]

Interesting. Email certainly has been a problem for Dreamhost before. And SquirrelMail is great that it's open source, but the client doesn't match up to Gmail's slick AJAX feature.

Setting up the non standard gmail pop3

[Anonymous Coward]

Gmail is a pain. Every time you look at the webmail or a google enabled homepage while signed in it resets its pop3 so the email stops downloading. Download with one pop3 software and the email becomes unavailable again to others. Reset the pop3 setting and then you end up downloading a second copy of everything just to get your newer email. You can not browse your webmail at work and then download it at home.

The only way I have found around this is the
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=47948&topic=1556
recent tag which makes it work like a proper pop3 server but only for the last 30 days. Go on holiday for more than 30 days and you are stuck with downloading everything again. And its a well hidden solution.

So set up with the recent tag and a filter to catch your sent emails coming back addressed to you and it is tolerable. But why have to go through the hassle? And to use it just a webmail means no backups and no pasting a photo into an email like you can in thunderbird.

No I would much rather have a standard pop3 email account for my main email with a webmail access perhaps.

Incidentally last time I loaded a new domain onto my dreamhost account it encouraged me to have my pages on google pages with google apps and my mail with gmail at which point I'm just paying dreamhost for the control panel? I declined.

Dreamhost has a problem

[weston]

... and if they require me to pipe my mail through Google, I'll take my business somewhere that doesn't.

They probably won't. If they do go down that road, I suspect what they'll do is charge extra for it, like they have recently when introduced a surcharge for "non-web content."

Dreamhost has a problem: they oversell. They've admitted it (http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/05/18/the-truth-about-overselling/ ), but like a lot of other things they do, they try to spin it as being a positive. They claim that sure, they'll lose money on a few customers that actually find something to do with the promised 200-500GB of disk space, but that's just a minority and in the meanwhile everybody else is so happy with being offered that much space they gain a lot of customers.

The problem with this approach? Eventually, a large number of your customers will find something to do with what you're selling them, and if you haven't prepared to deliver it to all of them, you're in trouble.

I bring up disk space specifically because that's already happened. Can you think of any particular application that just about anybody with a 100-200GB hard drive might want that much disk space on a host for? Of course -- online backup! You might not sign up thinking about it, but once you've got it, and you've already learned to run an ftp client to move things up and down, it's eventually going to occur to you.

So, lo and behold, last October, Dreamhost changes its TOS to make a completely artificial distinction between bits sitting on a disk that are going to be served via HTTP, and bits just... sitting there. That is, non-web "backup" content now carries an additional surcharge.

To some extent, I understand they have to do this, because they otherwise can't actually deliver on what they've sold.

But this will happen to them again. If they offer a certain capacity of service, eventually, people will figure out how to use it.

For example, other than backup/online file storage, what kind of GB-level usage are we starting to see from average users?

That's right, email.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

how Dreamhost uses Gmail

[Kildjean]

I have all my domains hosted there... so the domains i have most traffic on the email accounts are all hosted on the gmail servwers just because they are more accessible, but they all use their yourname.com domains. I think its a great tool.

Gmail filters

[StarHeart]

I have a Gmail account, and I played it with all of a few hours before I gave up on it. I realized how limited it's filter rule options are. Other just just flexibility in what it does have, it's biggest lacking is the ability to filter by e-mail headers.

    Here is a good example. I want to give out unique to addresses to everyone. Which Gmail does nicely support with extensions, in the form of user+extension@gmail.com, aka bob+mailinglist@gmail.com. But then say I receive an e-mail to that address from a mailing list that replaces the To: with itself. Now how am I to filter out messages to my unique To:? Yes, I could filter the mailing list by it's To:, but then people often do silly things like To: bob@hotmail.com CC: mailinglist@mailing.com.

    Another piece is how great everyone says Gmail's spam filter is. Well if it is go great, then why is my Gmail inbox full of spam? Plus it is completely uncustomizable. If I am having a problem with a certain type of spam, and I going to be able to get Gmail to add a new rule? Even if I could request one, is mine going to get done with the million other requests?

Re:Gmail filters

[ibsteve2u]

Me, I check my Gmail accounts with Thunderbird...which provides me rule making abilities limited only by my creativity (not so bad) and my laziness (serious constraint).

Re:Gmail filters

[StarHeart]

I use Thunderbird too, but server side filters are more reliable than client side filters. No need to copy rules between desktop, laptop, office desktop, and office laptop. Plus unless you use Thunderbird all the time they do you no good in Gmail. Client side filters also slow down the client, which can already be slow enough when you have huge folders.

no actually

[unity100]

the process of hosting a half decent website (any website that is not easily forfeitable if any problem occurs, personal resume, small business presentational, academic etc) is not something that is just as triggerhappy as the services automated google apps can handle. the support costs, if google started such a hosting, would be so immense that either google would have to offer crappy support, or pour huge monies into support. in former case the app would be a failure, in the second case the app would carry a decent price tag that wouldnt be too different from the normal web host companies. so it would all be the same.

Re:no actually

[Zarf]

Have you heard of Google App Engine? Doesn't that change things a little?

GMail being blocked by spam filters

[Animats]

Ars Technica reports that mail from GMail is now being blocked by some anti-spam vendors. Now that there are tools for automatically creating GMail accounts in bulk, GMail has become very popular with spammers. GMail is widely used as the reply address in spam emails, especially ones associated with bulk-created Blogger accounts. Check the reply address in most "replica watch" spams, for example.

Google has thus become a major supporting player in the spammer ecosystem. As a result, GMail isn't really a viable option for serious e-mail users any more. It's like being on Hotmail.

Re:GMail being blocked by spam filters

[keeboo]

As a result, GMail isn't really a viable option for serious e-mail users any more. It's like being on Hotmail.

Actually, Hotmail behaves better than Gmail. At least they provide the mail's sender IP, like any semi-civilised server.

GMail does not. They claim it's so in order to protect their users' privacy (believe it or not).

It doesn't help Gmail's cause they never reply mails sent to abuse@google.com.

Gmail is useful when it's leveraged...

[rickb928]

I use GMail as a forward from my own POP mail account. And I own that domain and run the servers. It's worth it both have a backup of my mail and let Gmail filter the spam even better.

Running your own mail is really not worth it. Spam filtering alone is too much bother, and the security issues are more than an amateur should tackle. My other users I encourage to forward to Gmail.

A friend of mine resisted offering mail with his web site business until very recently, when a customer made the case for it. Since then, he's been pestering me with spam questions. And SQL injection complaints, as he gets 15,000+ injection attempts daily to the contact forms he runs for clients. He just put up a simple human-verification gizmo, and it seems to have stopped that. But the spam is relentless.

My own personal email account is well over 12 years old, and I get 10,000+ spam a week with 75-140 ham messages in there. Gmail misses about 3 spams a week. My own server misses about 300. And I have about 50 false positives, all because DCC flags newsletters at an alarming rate. Is this because some lam0r forgot they had subscribed to a newsletter and report it as spam when they can't figure out how to unsubscribe? Probably. Not helpful.

I would not want to run mail for a hosting outfit. You have to go through a lot to have 99% spam detection, and even Google seems to fail this.

I just turned down a job as IT architect/net designer/whatever for a major ISP (not a major position, one of many doing this). Mostly because I didn't want to be assigned the P-to-P filtering jobs, or have to work to actually limit usage to control NAP costs and minimize user complaints. I wouldn't do Exchange or POP/IMAP mail for the same reasons. There are some mail systems I would run, but not anything terribly mainstream.

Email is pretty nearly completely broken. It's as if you drive your car through broken glass ALL THE TIME. You justify the extra-thick tires, picking shards out at every stoplight, carrying 6-10 spares in the trailer behind you that also gets flats, and even then get flats and are late for everything. The only poeple who make out in this are the tire industry (filtering and 'security', hah) and the glass scatterers (spammers). I wonder if the glass donators (spammer customers) actually get anything out of the exercise. Probably not, but this is another discussion.

grrr....

Matter of cost

[Natrone]

For my company, it is a matter of cost. Our hoster charges for bandwidth and disk. Email traffic contributes a large part of our total bandwidth. We can keep costs down by using GMail for mail and associated storage while our cost is used strictly for hosted files and websites.

Gmail as a killer application

[Standard User 79]

Gmail is really killer app for email, it's really the one place where no decent open source solutions exist. High volume email is extremely difficult to manage in the world of mbox/maildir type systems. And I have yet to se anything free or commercial that processes spam better.

Other problems

[futurekill]

Hosting companies (I have a DreamHost account) have other things to worry about such as terribly sluggish database performance. 1 minute initial page loads on a clean drupal install is pathetic.

Roll your own

[wikinerd]

Any self-respecting nerd runs their own mailserver, either at home or in a datacentre. My own email server is actually in a datacentre and works brilliantly. It is extremely easy to set up and maintain one, with full antispam and TLS secure encryption features. Mine runs Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 etch with exim and spamassassin. Installation was easy, maintainance is ok, spamming settings are doable with some creative thinking and monitoring. I cannot see why anyone with basic GNU/Linux skills couldn't roll out their own server, even at home. It is faster than Google Mail, more secure, more personal, more private, and under your complete control. And if you want the stability of a datacentre the fees aren't that much (mine, at the moment, is just 112 EUR per month, root access, 100mbps in Denmark).

Re:Roll your own

[Anonymous Coward]

I ran my own mail server from 1992 through 2000. Name servers, file servers, database servers and web servers too. It was a royal PITA and took me away from things I enjoyed and/or made money from. When someone can do it for free and do it 24/365 it is wonderful. I don't use gmail for my domains, but the principle is the same.

Now I just run the web stuff and DB stuff and let others run mail and name servers. It has simplified things immensely.

When I can switch everything (mysql, Apache, etc) to a Dreamhost-LIKE system (with better performance) and only have to manage content, I will be even happier.

I'd consider the Dreamhost PS (PS, I think) or something like it but I am not sure if the performance is better for the entire system or if there are still database bottlenecks or file server bottlenecks.

For about $350/month it sounds like a good deal to have them handle all the back-end stuff that is less cost-effective for me to handle myself.

Re:Roll your own

[The End Of Days]

Any self-respecting human being does whatever makes the most sense for them. Being proud about running your own email server is kinda like showing off your homemade wing on your Subaru - it doesn't smack of professionalism, it smacks of too much time on your hands.

Re:Roll your own

[Knara]

(mine, at the moment, is just 112 EUR per month, root access, 100mbps in Denmark).

That's a bit overdoing it for low-volume email, don't you think?

Solution anchored in the past

[Anonymous Coward]

This may now be an outmoded solution, but it is a solution that works for me. I still prefer a thick email client, like Outlook, over gmail. I then use Remote Desktop Connection to log onto my machine to check my email. The benefit of this technique is that I have my entire PC at my disposal for tasks above and beyond email.

Also, thick email clients allow me the flexibility to redirect email in to software that post processes the data. This same software then can automatically send an appropriate response email that can go back to the client. (A poor mans webserver if you will -- I hate maintaining webservers; I have better things to do with my time)

Email is a support black hole

[wsanders]

I used to work at a smallish ISP and I always wondered why people would pay $50/yr for a crappy POP mailbox when they could get Yahoo or Gmail or free email from any other of hundreds of providers.

For a small ISP, email is a support black hole. You are going to get 1 or 2 calls every day per 100 accounts, people complaining about too much spam, not enough spam, accidentally deleted their trash, why a message (that they have no idea where is was sent from or when) took 2 minutes extra to get through, etc, etc, etc. People are going to have 10GB mailboxes and you will have to figure out a way to keep up with the storage and provide backup and disaster recovery.

Of course Gmail addresses this issue by answering all support questions with "Who, me?"

I just switched

[Gitcho]

I've been with dreamhost for awhile, and the only trouble tickets i've entered have been related to their webmail being slow to the point of unusable. A few weeks ago, I saw the option to use google show up in their new domain creation wizard and took advantage of it, and switched all my mail to google for 5 of my production domains (make sure you create the account on google's side first).

My experience so far has been great - it's fast and reliable. Did I mention faster ? Google has significantly more invested in their webmail backend than dreamhost, and their use of ajax makes the ui nicer and email management faster (love the shortcut key feature "press R to reply").

I even downloaded google's email uploader and uploaded the last year's worth of email to google, and I still have only 1% used (of 6.7GB or something).

Search is the other huge advantage. It's fast and relevant, and the ui makes it quick to iterate through the result set. With the last year's worth of my email now sitting with google (yes, the sidebar ads are all targeted now, but i never click them anyway) i haven't used outlook since i switched.

For my clients, the move to google also gave them document collaboration and shared calendaring all with their own corporate logo (in place of the gmail logo).

Remember, all of the above is free - i'm not paying dramhost or google anything more for this. I still have the option of using their mail system if any of this doesn't work out.

Email is *designed* to be reliable

[gnuman99]

Sorry, but SMTP is suppose to be reliable. But people, in name of fighting SPAM and similar, and due to their own laziness, made is unreliable.

If mail server at start.com is sending mail to mail server at end.com, AND that mail server replies upon receiving the mail that it was delivered via a a-OK 2xx SMTP message, then that message IS delivered.

If the receiving end proceeds to shred the emails after ACCEPTING them, that is equivalent to receiving regular mail and shredding it without opening it.

The correct procedure for unwanted emails is to scan it at SMTP stage and REJECT it with 5xx message at the DATA state of SMTP. But because of laziness, the servers accepts the mail, then scans it and trashes it without a human ever seeing it. That's where the problem is - at the receiving end, NOT delivery path.

Scan all messages as a pre-queue. The worst that can happen is all filters get busy and the server have to issue a 4xx (temporary failure, try again) message to new connections for a minute or two. Considering SMTP protocol is DESIGNED for that, I don't see a problem. The result is email can be delayed by minutes, or hours, but it is actually delivered at receiving end.

If you can do post-queue scanning, you can do pre-queue scanning! There is no more processing power needed. And use 4xx to deal with traffic spikes on slow sites.

Heck yeah, taht saves so much on warrant hassle..

[cheros]

I think that is an *extremely* good idea.

After all, that way Google gets any warrant served in case someone wants to have a look at a mailbox (with Google search I guess it's just a matter of running a Justice Department "I feel lucky" query on "terrorist" or a RIAA search on "l33t torrent". Actually, no, they're US, I guess one can dispense with the warrant hassle, by now it's best not to ask and have the coffee ready for your friendly Fed. Even if the subject doesn't live in the country..

It also saves a good amount of time on any industrial espionage. Imagine someone inventing a better mousetrap, better keep an eye on their comms.

Sorry, my foot slipped off the sarcasm break just now. It's back.

Oh pulease!

[jotaeleemeese]

And if your email goes through other companies, how do you know it is not been scanned by a third party?

When did email become a private means of communication?

If you are going to slag Google at least do it for valid reasons.

Dreamhost Official Line vs Reality...

[weston]

The vast majority of which are written by ignorant script kiddies

Nice pre-emptive ad hominem.

who think that for $10/month they should be allowed to utilize unlimited resources and slow down the server for everyone else on it.

That's the Dreamhost official line, anyway. What's closer to the truth is that if you actually try to *use* the resources Dreamhost *sells* to you, they can't deliver.

They've admitted they oversell. They *count* on their profile customer not being able to take advantage of what they offer. But inevitably, if you offer a product that's useful, customers will find a way to use it.

So they're now trying to find ways to back away from fulfilling their rather lofty limits on storage and bandwidth. "Non-web" content now carries a surcharge -- because a significant number customers have figured out that large amounts of storage are good for online-backup. It doesn't surprise me that email's next, because next to storage, it's probably the highest space consumer for the average user.

And their service?

As far as cheaped shared web hosts go, Dreamhost is one of the best. Certainly many people get lucky with other hosts, but most hosting companies have not had to deal with the technical issues that Dreamhost has overcome over the years.

It's always someone else, isn't it? Poor Dreamhost -- nobody else has had to deal with the issues they have!

It *is* possible to run a stable, adequate shared hosting service. Hurricane Electric has price comparable offerings to what Dreamhost has. Sure, they've never offered the sky's-the-limit resources that Dreamhost has promised -- but I've only seen technical issues manifest themselves *once* in *ten years* on HE.

Dreamhost's had at least a dozen in the 2 1/2 I've been with them. Hell, csoft.net's been doing better than that, and for years they were pretty fly-by-night. This isn't to mention their billing problems, random hostname changes, and flippant attitude that may be entertaining in a newsletter context but really gets grating when you're addressing actual problems.

All that said, Dreamhost is fine for the kind of small website that doesn't need to worry much about uptime or using the kinds of resources Dreamhost ostensibly offers. Despite the fact that I think they're far better marketers than hosters, I may choose to keep a non-critical domain or two there for a while longer, just because of the hassle involved in move them away. But I really can't stand the posturing that goes on when this kind of thing comes up. Dreamhost may attract a higher number of high-expectations low-ability customers, but the problem here is not *at all* limited to their customers.

And your point is?

[jotaeleemeese]

Corporate email servers may be not as reliable as Google mail, but there are many regulatory reasons for which you must run your own servers.

An excuse of the kind of "Google ate my homework" will not wash with any regulators.

Re:And your point is?

[AngryNick]

Perhaps your regulator friends would like to share some of their requirements as they relate to the mandate that all companies must host their own mail servers? Last I checked they are really good at addressing the penalties for screwing up but rather thin on the "how" to do it.

Your "regulatory reasons" will generally fall into one of the following buckets of worry:

• Improper disclosure (for example, IRC 7216 - Penalty for disclosure or use of tax return information.)
• Retention (i.e., SEC rule 204-2, assuming it applies to email. Questions still exist.),
• Discovery (to comply with Rule 26 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure)

In my opinion, outsourcing email presents the same risks as allowing Iron Mountain to store your paper documents and using the argument that "Google might read my mail" is no different than "IronMountain might read my documents." The lawyers seem to have figured the Iron Mountain thing out, so its just a matter of time before outsouring email becomes the norm. But then, IANALE.

By Contrast -- uptime at Hurricane Electric

[weston]

448 days.

$10/month. Slightly more expensive than Dreamhost, sane amounts of disk space and bandwidth rather than sky's-the-limit promises, but they deliver what they promise, and they're far more stable.

Re:By Contrast -- uptime at Hurricane Electric

[Anonymous Coward]

I use dynanet dot ca ...

  10:37:43 up 56 days, 13:58, 1 user, load average: 0.59, 0.81, 0.95 (2 CPU Xeon) ... but that one is getting old so they have us set up on their newer quad Xeons ...

  10:38:41 up 4 days, 12:39, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.04, 0.01

Same idea, sane limits, reasonable rates and admins who watch their servers closely.

But if you expect 50GB of hard drive and 4 TB of bandwidth for $7.95/month, you won't get what you pay for :-D

Let him.

[jotaeleemeese]

People that are too lazy (there is a balance to be struck, but outsourcing every difficult service does not seem balanced to me) get paid less than people than can implement complex solutions.

One less admin to compete against !

Take a look again.

[Chas]

The ability to host your mail on GMail is an OPTION. If you don't take it, you get the standard server+Squirrelmail interface you always have with them.

GoDaddy

[airboyd]

I had to move my GoDaddy webmail to Gmail last year and then added my domain to Gmail. It's seamless and I like having Google Apps. I had to do this because GoDaddy's mail servers could not handle emails with attachments that had more than 2X+ characters in the name (they were working on a fix). The company I work for generates PDF files automatically and they have huge names and GoDaddy was just not letting them through. No bounce. No nothing. Email just disappeared. John_Smith_word_document_on_may_from_internet_printer.pdf would not make it through GoDaddy, it was a limitation on their mail software. No idea what else didn't make it through.

gmail praise

[unger]

notice all the users with low Slashdot IDs praising gmail.

Re:gmail praise

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, praise it then, you fuck, your ID is surely low enough, too.

Re:gmail praise

[keeboo]

There are naive people from all ages you know.

To answer the question, Yes.

[dogdick]

Is Google starting to make web hosts less necessary?"
Yes, as soon as they give me r00t on one of their boxes...

Confidentiality agreements make gmail unusable

[bigtrike]

We've got contracts with just about every client that states we're not allowed give information to third parties. This means we cannot use gmail, Google analytics, or Google apps because they do not take any measures to protect data or other information which may be disclosed in email.

I suggest that if you have any sort of confidentiality needs, you talk you company's lawyer before placing your company at risk for a lawsuit.

No way

[sherriw]

One of the reasons I use my webhost (not DreamHost) for my webmail, is because they are NOT Google. I have a solid, fast, clean webmail interface that has no ads, and I have never had any problems with it. I also don't have to worry about Google 'interpreting' it or something to show me targeted ads. My host also provides a handy means of backing it all up to my desktop, or I just bring it down into Thunderbird.

On top of that, if a company does not provide a contact email address on their OWN domain, then I can't help subconsciously questioning their legitimacy (regardless of how silly that is).

So, no, Google is not making web hosts less necessary.

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

The reality is that Google/MS/Yahoo offer a great service for your average company... The way all these people are complaining about scanning of mail, handing over data government, you'd think they were the ones selling the nukes to the Iranians.

I need email to communicate. I'm not doing anything illegal. Just trying to make a living with the least amount of hassle.

I agree. mostly

[Orig_Club_Soda]

I have a personal relationship with a web hosting company and they could never offer the suite of tools and ease of use that Google and Yahoo offer. They just dont have the staff resources. Yahoo and Google's content sharing, calendars, mail and etc are the best on the net. The only problem with the online solution is privacy, ad content, and the lack of local copy.

See www.gmail-is-too-creepy.com

[Khopesh]

I hope you're not stupid enough to think that your company's trade secrets are safe in email that doesn't go through gmail...

www.gmail-is-too-creepy.com has a good run-down of the issues with using Google's email. Specifically, Google tracks everything and has a LOT of intimate knowledge of using statistical data (like the data in your corporate emails) for it's own benefit -- behold the power of relational databases (Bayesian techniques are just the tip of the iceberg).

Also of note, even without encryption, intra-office email travels from one user's computer to the company's internal mail server, never leaving the office. The recipient is also in the office, so even upon delivery, nobody can have read the message. On top of this, any sane implementation will involve encryption (SSMTP and IMAPS), so even if either or both of these users are off-site, it still doesn't pass unencrypted outside the company.

What happens if Google goes bankrupt in 10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure it's no problem for your company when all your company's internal emails--even deleted ones--for the last decade are sold to the highest bidder (competitor).

Dreamhost Who Cares

[porkface]

Interestingly enough, web hosting is also something Dreamhost does not do well.

They are a too-good-to-be-true priced web hosting firm that does not respond to support claims in a timely manner, if at all. They suffer many outages and major performance problems, and their support and service lines simply go silent when major problems hit.

So, it comes as no surprise that they cannot offer a reasonable email service.

(Dreamhost + Google Apps) * Non-profit = Win!

[Anonymous Coward]

I just moved an 11 person non-profit to Gmail through Dreamhost. Btw, Dreamhost offers a free hosting package worth $1,000 for non-profits, Google Apps gives you a free educational edition (no ads, 100 users) if you're a non-profit, so my clients are pretty happy.

Dreamhost has been off lately.

[TellarHK]

I've been a Dreamhost customer for a couple years, since seeing someone here mention them a while back. And I used to be really happy with them. Unfortunately, right at the same time as they're making this push to suggest people use Google Apps for email serving - which may be a good idea - they're also having some really disastrous support issues for some customers.

I suggested a client of mine, who has a small business that needs a steady uptime but doesn't generate enough money yet to pay for a dedicated host, switch to Dreamhost so I could design him a new web presence on Wordpress. We got him all set up there, his new site went live, he loved everything about it... but then the cluster it was on turned out to be a three month lemon. So bad, Dreamhost is actually killing brand-new hardware and putting people on other systems. This is good... except that it's taken them months to do it, and many websites like my client's were just plain -down- for days at a time.

They even at one point sent me an email saying "We've moving you to another server as you requested, it started an hour ago." which came two hours after the client said to go with another host.

I got him calmed down thanks to Dreamhost's email - mainly because I haven't been paid for the -first- 60 hours of work on this site - and avoided the move, but the next week the server in question crapped out again and his site was still on it. The email felt like a lie. For $10 a month, you can't expect five nines, but you should be able to expect something better than a week to two of downtime a year which is what people on the blingy cluster were getting. Also of note, Dreamhost has no phone support.

I stuck with Dreamhost for quite some time, but I really just can't suggest them until they get things straightened out. All this coming on the heels of February's "Bill all customers for a year or two instead of a month." mistake, and I'm hoping they have a bit of a shakeup.

My personal sites are staying there, because I'm not anal about uptimes and they're fairly inexpensive, but I get a bad feeling from how they handled this cluster issue and how they're pushing people off to different mail servers. It makes me worried.

DH is overrated anyway

[billcopc]

I don't know how bad it is elsewhere, but I've heard a lot of bad things about DreamHost, particularly in the area of reliability and performance. Apparently they oversell way too much, and then fail to deliver what most people would consider reasonable service for the price.

Don't even get me started on their ludicrous claims of disk space and bandwidth... Hell, I could offer a million people "up to" 5 terabytes a month. Good luck maxing that pipe while the CPU gets bogged down with everyone's broken PHP scripts and daily Diggs over some asshat's "top 10 link whores" list.

mail reader? What's that.

[GregNorc]

I've never used a separate application for email. Born in 1988, I spent my formative years with free webmail, bouncing from hotmail to yahoo before finally settling with gmail. I actually just stopped using iCal and started using Google Calendar. I just don't see a reason, unless I were to desire a custom domain.

Great in Short Term....... but!

[andrew404]

Boy has Dreamhost put an expiration date on the long term business viability!

They have taken what is seemingly good idea for their bottom line in terms of support and maintenance of mail server services, and have just sold themselves out of one of the most important aspects of the hosting business ( and most subscription service businesses)...... VENDOR LOCK-IN!!

I'm not saying that I'm a proponent of vendor lock-in, who as a customer is? But as a service provider, the more your customers are tied and dependent to your service, the more likely that the comfort zone of maintaining the status-quo will keep them as your customer.

For many organizations, mail services and mail data have got to be one of the primary factors that keep them with their current providers. Migrating data, accounts etc... is an expensive endeavor.

Personally, as a Dreamhost customer who has used the automatic google Apps for your Domain setup on the dreamhost panel, I thought the feature was great.... given that I never used dreamhosts mail servers anyway and have been using gmail (and calendar and...) for some time.

But purely looking at this as a business decision, it's a horrible move. There is reason that Google is offering mail services for free. To keep you as a captive audience. There will be a time when hosting all your mail data will reap great rewards (keep an eye on your TOS ppl!)

The expression that comes immediately to mind to characterize the future of the internet business model is.... "All your data are belong to us!"

Accountability? From a shared hosting environment?

[weston]

I'd love to be surprised here, but I expect that the level of accountability you can expect from Dreamhost is just about nil. Like just about everybody else in this space, I suspect that their terms of service basically say they can suspend your account at any time for any or no reason.

Unless you have an agreement that says otherwise, it's quite likely they're under no obligation to provide you with access to their machines, or any data residing on them.

Periodically you can read stories about people whose accounts were cut off, not only from Dreamhost, but from other hosts as well. The common refrain? They can't get to the data they had there.

I think somebody needs to start a movement to include a provision about data access and termination for hosting environments.

Good move - no value there

[benjto]

I ran a small managed hosting business. 90% of my revenue was from dedicated servers and equipment.

I felt compelled to run my own email servers "that is what hosting companies do". It was a bad move because my clients did choose my company for the email (it wasn't that good). As spam got worse and GMail @yourdomain.com appeared, it was a no-brainer to suggest that clients move their email. They were happy and my time was better spent on real money making activities.

On one hand I am not suprised DH did this. The vast majority of their clients will be happier. On the other hand, I am surprised that DH would align themselves with a potential competitor. Google actively markets "Google Sites" on GMail. Some clients will switch.

dreamhost info

[SethJohnson]

Check my sig for details on Dreamhost's quotas. For less than $8.00 a month, your account gets way more than 2gb of storage. I think my account has something like 315gb of storage, 2000gb of bandwidth, and I'm hosting 8 different domains with the same account.

Seth

This an excuse for their own shitty service.

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

Just like Godaddy's shitty email service... These companies dont want to support email as it should be, so they dump it off to google??????????????

Looks like in the future i'll deal with hosts that have a higher quality service.

Gmail is great but... if you run a company, i think its better to have your email on your own domain.

Four little letters. IMAP

[Chas]

Seriously, is it that hard?

Almost Switched this week - Dealbreaker for Me

[BrendaEM]

I almost switched to Dreamhost this week, until I found out about this bull$hit. I guess I am sticking to my current provider. I have thousands of pop emails. I can sort and search instantly in Thunderbird. The ability to make and break email accounts is a good thing for preventing spam.

Re:Almost Switched this week - Dealbreaker for Me

[Vegeta99]

But Google provides (freely, as in keg) email services for domain names - with the ability to add and drop accounts as you see fit!

gmail

[rawg]

I run small ISP with web hosting. I only have 100 email accounts and my server get pounded by SPAM. I get a million spam emails a month going through it. It's completely nuts. Why do I want to waste all my bandwidth on spam email. Let Google deal with it, that's what I say.

What world do you live in?

[NDPTAL85]

Since when did the use of Linux surpass the use of Windows and Mac OS X?

Free software hasn't killed the proprietary software business. I really think you are jumping the gun here.

Re:What world do you live in?

[NetSettler]

I voluntarily discounted my karma bonus to make this reply, which is really just a courtesy response and won't advance the debate.

Free software hasn't killed the proprietary software business.

You're right that the effect is not total. However, some free software projects have killed some proprietary software efforts. It's a subjective matter to decide how significant that effect is--I happen to rate the negatives more highly than some other people.

Anyway, my intent was not to open the whole free software debate, it was merely to allude to it, so I'll agree to disagree with you on this point rather than re-do the entire debate here. I wasn't intending to troll about free software, only to make an allusion about free software to those who, like me, believe that effect to be significant. If you're not one of them, and you think I'm nuts for thinking as I do, I guess I can live with that for today. We'll debate the issue of free software another time in another forum in a more serious way, I'm quite sure.

I really think you are jumping the gun here.

Yes and no. After all, I did say "If Google becomes the standard of mail," so that's of course a hypothetical. I didn't say it had happened. I was hypothesizing about an effect that could happen by applying observations about a trend in another area. I hardly think it's jumping the gun to speculate. All speculation jumps the gun. That's the point of speculation, to be ahead of the gun.

fuckup

[Anonymous Coward]

You idiot, you have to use "Encrypt filenames" when you create the *.rar file.

When idiots do things, idiotic things happen.

Re:Webmail: No privacy = illegal in Australia etc.

[bit01]

You can still have your name@company.com address through their mail servers

Until Google guarantees, in writing, that it will not data mine in any way, ad's or otherwise, or they provide a mechanism all users can use to opt out of all their marketing, gmail cannot be used by companies in most countries with data privacy laws.

Data privacy laws guarantee that private data, including email messages, that a company acquires cannot be used for any purpose other than the original business transaction without warning plus opt out. e.g. Item 2.1(c) in Australia'a national privacy principals. If google does not warn all potential users of this fact in the relevant countries before businesses sign up, and the companies concerned do not do the same, then they are engaged in illegal activity.

If google can't data mine that breaks their business model. Why are they free hosting businesses again?

---

Beware deceptive astroturfers.

FireGPG addon to Firefox

[xargoon]

There is a great addon to Firefox, FireGPG which adds new buttons to gmail like Sign, Encrypt, Sign+Encrypt.

It also decrypts and verifies incoming mails.

nay

[unity100]

engines, automation does not matter. there are many big hosting companies that do very extensive automation. if people are just going to put up a few pages, and not care about anything else, they work out great. but, if they are going to do something a little more serious, whooops - you need to provide support. all kinds of issues may come up.

Re:nay

[Zarf]

App Engine will allow you to host your web applications on top of the Google Application hosting system. When you finally put that with Google Page Creator, wouldn't that mean that Google is hosting web applications of every stripe... from simple web pages to complex full featured custom developed web applications?

Re:nay

[unity100]

web hosting is not about 'applications'. its about customization. more than half of any serious web hosting customer will want to do something different than whats already being provided, including any app you thought was secure. one will come up and say that they want to use a particular format with their web page but cant do it with page creator. some other will say that he wants to park a domain and redirect it in a particular fashion. not even talking about stuff thats more serious, like ecommerce scripts, forum scripts and such. take oscommerce as an example - its a standard script, but no two oscommerce stores are the same.

Re:nay

[Zarf]

I wonder if most companies really care about oscommerce stores or any of these web hosting things we think they care about. I wonder if they don't see web sites as marketing space and utility in a site as more hassle than necessity. I wonder if many companies will be perfectly happy to rent software as if it were some kind of service using some kind of centralized checkout system to wash their hands of hosting a page almost entirely and care for little other than CSS based branding.

It's all just idle pie-in-the-sky speculation anyway. I'm sure what we now call web development won't become completely obsolete for at least another decade. Especially with the shortage of web talent that I see out there now.

Re:nay

[unity100]

I wonder if many companies will be perfectly happy to rent software as if it were some kind of service using some kind of centralized checkout system to wash their hands of hosting a page almost entirely and care for little other than CSS based branding. no they wouldnt. when you start accepting credit card and confidential information from clients, you become wary of privacy issues. locking in oneself to 3rd party services is a total no no. recently microsoft suddenly ceased its bcentral service. this service was a 3rd party estore service, in which you created a store and parked a domain on top of it and then ran the store from their location with their particular db. i had to bail out a client from this fallout. its not nice. you have to translate customer db, 3000+ products, orders, and whatnot to other formats. what did those who werent able to jump ship at the 1 month notice they gave do, god knows.

no you cant trust your business to 3rd party apps.

Running your own mail server is too much trouble!

[slipperman]

What started as a hobby hosting my own Exchange server for family and friends slowly became a part time job. From making sure the system was backed up regularly, to battery backed up, and not to mention making sure my internet connection was not disrupted by other projects eventually made the whole thing way more work and responsibility than I signed up for. Once the server went down while I was on vacation, and I felt terrible. I slowly migrated all my users off my Exchange server onto GMAIL for domains over the last few months and since then I've slept alot better at night. Once the project went from fun to work, It was more trouble than it was worth.

Google is the new Walmart.

[Anonymous Coward]

Get used to it.

Re:Webmail: No privacy = illegal in Australia etc.

[nukal]

This is absolutely right! Until Google can guarantee the privacy of correspondence, businesses are unlikely to shift away from maintaining their own mail servers. The risk of litigation from clients whose personal details are transmitted via a third party is too signficant for businesses to ignore. Consider the amount of information that circulates around internal email servers behind the firewall of many SMEs. The gmail solution may be great for people content with having their data being read by third parties, but privacy obligations of businesses to their clients, in Australia and elsewhere, would eliminate this as an option.

So where's the FOSS Webmail... ?

[Lazy Jones]

... for the rest of us who think that giving all your private and/or business e-mails to Google (or any other company that tries to earn money with your free e-mail service) isn't such a bright idea?

SquirrelMail and Horde left much to be desired last time I checked (esp. UI-wise). Zimbra is like buying a taxi corporation when you just need a car (I don't need an Outlook clone in JS, thank you). Anything I missed?

Following the money

[name.com]

From a service provider standpoint supporting email, particularly webmail, is a true cost center. And depending on the core business of the provider it may not be economically viable. In a free market world why not partner with a leader to provide the best possible service at little to no cost.

We've partnered with Google to provide a seamless integration with Gmail and Apps which removes the hassles of setting up MX records, etc. which means even the most inexperienced web user can utilize the Gmail services for their domains. In doing so we've improved customer satisfaction and driven down our costs, which in turn means we can continue to offer very low cost domain registration.

It's worth noting that the average person still uses a free email address as their standard form of e-communication. Even those that are web savvy and have their own domain names. We find that the majority of our registrants use a Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo! email address as their default. Tucows notes the same.

The reality is that companies with a vested interest in capturing eyeballs are going to continue to dominate this space. When it is no longer profitable for them to do so FOSS might be viable, but until that point I wouldn't bet on it.