Comment by unicornporn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unicornporn | Hacker News Reader

FastMail looks tempting. But, excusez-moi, it seems quite expensive for what (you seem to) get. I have an email archive that's around 20GB on server. That would cost me $120 a year. Right now I'm paying for a Dreamhost account. For around $100 a year I get "unlimited" storage, IMAP access, Roundcube access and support for domains. And this is only besides all the shared hosting features has never let me down so far.

I know FastMail is dedicated to delivering email/calendar only and that they are famous for an elegant service. But seriously, how fancy can email be?

Dreamhost is not a great mail host. Before moving my email to Google Apps for Domains I found Dreamhost's IMAP and SMTP notably slower and not super-relable (not constant failures but enough to notice). Do they even have any meaningful spam filtering?

It never happened to me but I think with Dreamhost mail hosting you run the risk of your email suffering from collateral damage if another customer using the same mail server is labeled a spammer (even if you pay extra for a static ip for your web hosting, I don't think it's used for your mail traffic).

What's good about Dreamhost for email is the "unlimitedness," not just mail storage but also domains, email accounts, email aliases, etc. I still use them for a bunch of per-site addresses that forward to a real mailbox so I can just delete the per-site address if it gets spammed.

I'm not sure what Dreamhost's e-mail offering is like, but I chose FastMail over running my own e-mail server because I'm not enough of a sysadmin to be confident in setting up and maintaining my own e-mail server without opening it up to abuse (there are enough involuntary spam relays already).

When I compared the major e-mail providers at the time, FastMail won because it was the closest to running your own server in terms of configurability (but much easier), it provided a great web UI (not as important for me personally, but some people don't use native clients), it was somewhat open about its technical infrastructure and it was doing one thing and one thing only (i.e. providing e-mail/calendar/contacts services).

Actually, with any reasonable smtp server, the defaults these days are pretty good -- so email abuse/open relay isn't the problem it once was. The hurdle (if any) these days is making sure email you send isn't flagged as spam, and to a lesser extent to avoid receiving spam (I say lesser, but then I've been running greylisting from day one, which is a minor nuisance, in and off itself).

That said, using a good service (like fastmail) vs running your own will always be a trade-off -- and it's perfectly reasonable to not run your own email.

Sure, but it can still be quite daunting if you're not much of a sysadmin. I'm a web developer primarily and though I feel confident setting up a basic web server and SSH, I'm not even entirely sure what software I need or should use (when there are multiple alternatives) to set up a fully working e-mail server.

Add to that messing with cryptic configuration files while reading about the dangers of doing it wrong and the general impression is that you shouldn't be touching any of it unless you fully understand it all. As far as beginner friendliness goes, it's a bit like desktop Linux was ten years ago.

> As far as beginner friendliness goes, it's a bit like desktop Linux was ten years ago

No, it's much worse.

10 years ago you could get a desktop Linux up and running, the experience wasn't that much different from today and even if you screwed up, you could always reinstall it from scratch, but with email screw-ups may mean getting your domain blacklisted and good luck fixing it afterwards.

There is a bit of a documentation vacuum. We (Linux users, admins and developers) could learn a lot from freebsd and openbsd here. Something like https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/task-mail-server gets you on your way (maybe too far, actually -- you probably don't want/need all that for an initial setup) -- but certificate requests, and certificates is still too hard.

https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/ssl-cert helps, but afaik, nothing automagically does the right thing, yet (install certifate under /etc/ssl and the private key under /etc/ssl/private and symlink under /etc/exim/cert.{key|der or whatever} and ditto for other daemons that share the same cert/key.

And then there is tuning to disable plain text for most of those services.

So, yeah, it's still too complex.

I really don't understand everyone that are panicked about getting your domain blacklisted -- yes, if you send spam you'll be blacklisted. Yes, if you set up an open relay, that's bad. But you really have to work pretty hard to set up an open relay these days.

iRedMail is pretty nice for helping you get a mail server set up easily with sane defaults: http://www.iredmail.org/features.html

Speaking as a recent convert to Fastmail from Gmail and Dreamhosts roundcube offering I have to say Fastmail is a hell of a lot better experience, it's quick, uncomplicated, and slick with great keyboard shortcuts. Roundcube on Dreamhost is fine for what it is but couldn't be compared with Gmail in terms of usability, Fastmail can. Don't get me wrong I'm not sure its as good as Gmail (spam protection for example is not as good), but you're getting a vastly better webmail experience than Roundcube.

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