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Mail hosting
adrianw:
For many years I have had an expensive Developer Account with Gradwell, providing me with DNS entries, fixed email addresses no matter my ISP, ODMR for pulling email onto my own mail server), SMTP for sending mail, a web site, a domain and web site for a sadly defunct little festival, and shell access.
I have not really needed web sites or shell access for years.
I was relatively happy to continue paying them a quite handsome sum as there were few problems, and when there were they were very responsive, but late last year they introduced their new "cloud" system, defining the old system as "legacy". Almost all control is achieved through their new control panel, which I cannot log in to and it looks as if it will take their full target 5 days before they respond to my ticket.
So, I am looking around for a mail hosting supplier, ideally cheap, who will accept and store mail for a small number of addresses in a domain, host that domain, send incoming mail to my mail host with SMTP ETRN/ODMR and accept SMTP outgoing mail.
I have found a supplier called etrn.com who appear to be able to do all that, from the look of it quite cheaply. Does anybody know anything bad about them?
Does anybody know of another supplier? Smart hosting allowing me to use my fixed email address on outgoing email and ETRN/ODMR for incoming email are critical. Encrypted email transmission would be nice. I really don't want to use POP3 or IMAP.
NB: I do my own mail scanning with ClamAV for viruses, SpamAssassin for spammers. I read mail with a text MUA (mutt on FreeBSD) and have Malwarebytes and Windows Defender on my Windows machines.
highpriest:
Your needs are quite specific and I doubt a 'cloud' email provider like Google Apps or O365 will meet your requirements. Why not roll your own? A VPS can be had for very little. For redundancy, you can have two at separate locations. Of course, you will need to set it up and manage it all yourself. I handle my own email (for multiple domains) hosted on VPSes from DigitalOcean and Scaleway.
Good domain registrars (I use Enom and GoDaddy) will give you a nice DNS control panel. DigitalOcean can host your DNS zones as well for free (but they are not a registrar).
Weaver:
i'm happy to recommend UKservers in Somerset (trading as VirtualNames)
http://www.virtualnames.co.uk/email_services.php
whom I have used for many years for my customers and myself. They do customised domain name hosting and registration, excellent email hosting with a DNS control panel plus Apache-based web hosting. Following on from high priest's recommendations, ukservers could be used to register your domain names cheaply and could point them to whichever servers you wish or couldhandle the DNS internally, so could complement highpriest's advice. They don't offer admin-level shell access to servers though.
adrianw:
Highpriest: I had thought a bit about a couple of VPSs. Maybe I should think more. Exposing SMTP servers of my own to the internet in general makes me edgy. I did look a little at Google's business service, but decided against it quite early on.
Weaver: Yes, if I go the VPS route VirtualNames could well be a good choice for DNS services, but as Highpriest points out, there are other suppliers. I am not at all keen on using POP3 or IMAP to access mailboxes (pull and delete their content with fetchmail), and really want somebody who supports ETRN or ODMR. This seems very rare.
Meanwhile, Gradwell have now ignored my ticket for over 11 days, but have invoiced me for another year of legacy web hosting. A far cry from 2002 where support emails would be answered in hours, or 2001 when some were answered by PG himself.
Weaver:
I do also use 123-reg for DNS too. If memory serves, they don't have the same level of functionality and flexibility quite, but they used to be somewhat cheaper for some domains. They are very good, and I have used both companies for fifteen years.
UKServers do encrypted email in both directions, including encrypted SMTP and SMTP-auth, which is what I use (although with POP3).
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