Email Hosting

brawney

Perch
It doesn't look like JH has an email hosting plan similar to other hosts such as this one. But the shared hosting plans are inexpensive enough to allow people to sign up for hosting and use only the email service.

Looking for SMTP/POP3 access for 4 users. This is mainly personal mail, not business, but it needs to be reliable. They would be pulling all mail off the server with each POP3 session, and using SMTP to send mail.

I have a VPS here at JH but don't want to go through the added work of installing the software, getting SSL certificates for the mail domain, and all the other stuff that's needed to host email on that server.

I'm considering a shared hosting plan just for the email features. I'm concerned about the black listing problem that seem to plague web hosting vendors (including JH). Is this a real concern or is JH good at keeping the servers off black lists? I like that JH is transparent about their issues, with public notification in the forum for example. I'm sure many hosts just handle these problems via the support tickets so their users have no idea how much of a problem it really is at those hosts.

So I have 2 basic questions:
1) Is JH shared hosting going to cause me a lot of support work because of black listing?
2) Should I go through the effort of just using my VPS?
 
a few things on blacklists, yes, they happen, we ca't deny and don't deny, but we do a decent job of keeping off, however sometimes they still happen and we do suspend a number of accounts and reseller end accounts for spam issues that are complex, otherwise we just try to change the passwords or disable at service level for a client/reseller end user if something happens, because sometimes it is a virus/malware or comprimized email pass making the problem.

Also when a blacklists happens we move the ip so it isn't an issue just then, once some day or two pass, we move it back, as its have the source of spam stopped ad gets delisted.

We have no issue with using accounts for mail like this.
1) no.
2) your choice really blacklistings can happen even on vps with the same issues as outlined above.
 
Was wondering about forwarding your mail to another place (like gmail) and spam. Many mail hosts will not forward any spam because it will get their IP black listed. If someone is using gmail as their email 'client' then this causes issues when mail they might want to see lands in the spam box at JH, because the user never knows about it. I would think that wrapping the email in some kind of forwarding envelop would solve that problem. Just wondering where JH stands on this subject.

In any case, the users can fetch their mail using POP3, which I am assuming will give them all their mail, even SPAM, and avoid this whole issue.
 
Also when a blacklists happens we move the ip so it isn't an issue just then, once some day or two pass, we move it back, as its have the source of spam stopped ad gets delisted.

We have no issue with using accounts for mail like this.
1) no.
2) your choice really blacklistings can happen even on vps with the same issues as outlined above.

Thanks Steven. I agree, using my own IP on the VPS will cause me to have to check black lists and then respond if it does get listed. I don't want to use our VPS because it will cause me much more work. ;)

We will have strong passwords so our account won't get hijacked. And our mail traffic will be very low. I don't forsee us getting tagged as spammers. You won't have any problems from us. :D

I'm sure this is a big job for you guys to manage, and you probably deal with it on a daily basis. Identifying the rogue user, stopping them, switching IP addresses, getting the IP off the black list, etc. Lots of work. I know you guys stay on top of it.

Thanks for the reply.
 
I've been playing with forwarding email from my JH domain to a gmail account. I have not seen any issues, but then again if mail bounces would I (as the receiver) know?

Looking in the mail that successfully gets forwarded to gmail I always see an SPF fail or soft fail message, which is a bit of a concern to me.


Received-SPF: softfail (google.com: domain of transitioning [email protected] does not designate 173.0.xxx.xxx as permitted sender)


It seems that SPF is broken by forwarding mail. But the subject is confusing. Seems that SPF is telling people like google that they need to ignore the failure, but doesn't that undermine the whole idea of SPF?

But apparently there is a way for forwarders (like JH) to fix this issue. See: http://www.openspf.org/Best_Practices/Forwarding. Notice info on SRS in the section at the bottom titled "SPF Friendly Options for Forwarders". Does JH think that implementing SRS is worth considering to resolve this issue?

Also, was wondering if there is any way to see our mail server activity so we could determine if any mail is being bounced back to the sender.



Was wondering about forwarding your mail to another place (like gmail) and spam. Many mail hosts will not forward any spam because it will get their IP black listed. If someone is using gmail as their email 'client' then this causes issues when mail they might want to see lands in the spam box at JH, because the user never knows about it. I would think that wrapping the email in some kind of forwarding envelop would solve that problem. Just wondering where JH stands on this subject.

In any case, the users can fetch their mail using POP3, which I am assuming will give them all their mail, even SPAM, and avoid this whole issue.
 
I am not sure about the modifications that can be done, this would have to be done by Parallels. We carefully watch all forwarders setup and flow as they are causes of listing our servers as spam many times.
 
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