Ask HN: How are you hosting email at your domain name? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How are you hosting email at your domain name?

5 pointsbillpaetzke12 comments

This could be your personal professional email (i.e. you@yourpersonalsite.com) or your company's email (i.e. you@yourcompany.com). I am only interested in web-based or self-hosted Linux solutions (so that rules out Microsoft Exchange).

I've considered hosting with Google Apps. I've seen a number of notable hackers go that route. But I'm not sure I want to give up that much privacy and control. I've searched for some self-hosting Linux solutions (free or paid), and I wasn't impressed with the results I found.

Thanks in advance.

View on HN

Google apps or a local server like Postfix relaying outgoing email through a service such as AuthSMTP. Deliverability is a PITA otherwise. You have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get email providers to accept your email if using a dedicated solution (including VPS) and if it's a shared server then you are at the mercy of other users who could be spamming people from the same IP and get it blacklisted.

I have my e-mail hosted on a prgmr.com VPS. How do I check for deliverability issues? (I have noticed none.)

Focused email service providers like Fastmail.fm (just acquired by Opera, which is directing would be new customers of Opera Premium? Email to it) are one good solution.

If you want good spam and virus scanning protection you probably want to outsource it in one way or another.

Exim for SMTP, Courier for POP3 and/or IMAP, and SquirrelMail or RoundCube for the web front-end - all available for Linux. It's good enough for cPanel, so it's good enough for me.

Edit: Incidentally, it should be noted that all email is "web-based" these days...

Re: web-based

Yeah, I guess I meant 3rd-party-hosted.

I use postfix for SMTP and dovecote for IMAP. All free software. There's a million guides for setting it up and for fixing issues. There's also a million different ways to tweak it to do anything you want.

pair.com has worked very well for me, for ten years or so. It's freebsd shared hosting, but if you're willing to consider gapps this is reasonable too. Includes two or three web interfaces, as well as imap.

Our website runs on heroku so we use rackspace hosted email. I recommend it

I use rackspace hosted email as well. Very happy with it.

go with Google Apps: easy to install , Free and featured :)

using google apps too.

I have a couple of domains at Google Apps, which works really well. I also have a couple of domains at my local ISP (also my colocation facility).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com