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Re:Ask HN: Gmail alternatives? by rufugee on Friday February 12, 2010 @03:40PM (#1121707)
Did it for years. Loved it. The only problem? Hosting providers and colos often reuse IPs that have been blacklisted because of spammers, so one day you realize some folks just haven't been getting your mail. I use a leased server and would switch back from GMail to Zimbra in a heartbeat if I thought I could reliably insure my email would not get blacklisted. There are services out there you can pay for that offer smtp gateways, but they often charge on a per domain basis, and I need to send/receive email for 50+ domains. Pretty expensive.

If anyone has any suggestions to get around this sort of limitation, I'm all ears and will be back on Zimbra before the weekend is out ;-)

Re:Ask HN: Gmail alternatives? by wheels on Friday February 12, 2010 @04:01PM (#1121749)
We use SendGrid: http://sendgrid.com/

They've got a free account for up to 200 mails a day.

Re:Ask HN: Gmail alternatives? by qjz on Friday February 12, 2010 @03:56PM (#1121741)
I've set up a number of mail servers for myself and clients. I've always asked providers upfront to guarantee that I can get assigned to a new netblock if any of the IP addresses they give me show up on any blacklists. In some cases, just asking resulted in getting clean IPs from previously unused netblocks. In the few cases where the IPs were blacklisted, I got new ones without any problems.
Re:Ask HN: Gmail alternatives? by lsc on Sunday February 14, 2010 @06:50AM (#1124465)
Nearly all providers will give you a new IP if your old one got blacklisted before it was assigned to you.

Note; 'clean IPs from unassigned netblocks' are not necessarily good. see bogon filtering[1] - still, running your own mailserver is not an impossibly difficult task.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogon_filtering

Re:Ask HN: Gmail alternatives? by mmelin on Friday February 12, 2010 @03:45PM (#1121720)
AuthSMTP is priced with a fixed number of "email From: addresses", but what they don't tell you on the pricing page is that you can add a whole domain (wildcard *@domain.com) and it just counts as one address.

Looking at their pricing page it looks like you'd be out about $150-160 bucks per year. Up to you to decide if it's worth it, but hardly expensive in the normal sense of the word.

Re:Ask HN: Gmail alternatives? by eli on Friday February 12, 2010 @06:57PM (#1122189)
That works great until a spambot decides to start spamming <1000 common usernames>@yourdomain.com
Re:Ask HN: Gmail alternatives? by imp on Friday February 12, 2010 @08:44PM (#1122349)
Isn't that what SPF is designed to protect? They'll never get through if you have a strict SPF record that lists AuthSMTP as the only email server for your domain.
Re:Ask HN: Gmail alternatives? by keyist on Friday February 12, 2010 @05:12PM (#1121944)
I haven't experienced getting added back to a blacklist off a significant webmail host after being taken off one. Once your IP is in the clear, it'd take some abuse to be put back (anecdotal). These 3 steps usually get me unblocked if starting with a bad IP:

1. Set up reverse DNS for your IP address

2. Publish an SPF record

3. Check the Spamhaus lists http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=1.2.3.4 and request removal if your IP address is on them.

As an addendum to grandparent: extremely comprehensive guide to postfix + dovecot here: http://workaround.org/ispmail

Re:Ask HN: Gmail alternatives? by eli on Friday February 12, 2010 @06:59PM (#1122193)
Spamhaus is one list. There are hundreds. (See http://www.dnsbl.info/dnsbl-list.php for starters) Some are nearly impossible to get off of.
Re:Ask HN: Gmail alternatives? by wheels on Friday February 12, 2010 @07:39PM (#1122259)
Been there, done that, didn't work. We don't even know why GMail was black-holing our mails, but we did everything on their suggested list for getting out of the world-o-pain and still often our mails were landing in the spam folder, hence the switch to SendGrid.