Email providers..

[toppstuff]

Hi all

I use demon for my home email services.

They are fine for broadband - its a good service.

But I have lots of problems with their pop3 accounts. Sometimes they let me in, sometimes they don't.

They seem to have troublesome servers down demon way.

I'm hacked off with the inconsistency.

Perhaps I should change.

Who'se any good out there?

[JamieBeeston]

get your own dedicated server, solves your problems, unlimited email accounts

only downside is its slightly not free

[sybaseian]

toppstuff said:

Hi all I use demon for my home email services. They are fine for broadband - its a good service. But I have lots of problems with their pop3 accounts. Sometimes they let me in, sometimes they don't. They seem to have troublesome servers down demon way. I'm hacked off with the inconsistency. Perhaps I should change. Who'se any good out there?

I did some consultancy work with they at the begining of the year - they had server performance problems with one of their database servers. It seems that they are running on as few boxes, staff, etc as they can get away with. But that's just what I observed, can say what there customer service, etc is like.

[Marshy]

This is techie, but works for me.

I have broadband and a (not very) dynamic IP address.

I signed up for a free account with no-ip.com. This gives me one or more thing.no-ip.com names which I can point to whatever my current IP address is with between 1 and 5 minutes delay.

I also have my own domain (well, more than one, but hey) which I registered through buydomains.com. Random choice, but not a bad one, as their web control panel seems pretty good.

Using said control panel, I set the mail exchanger host for that domain to be thing.no-ip.com.

Back at base, I run an update client to inform no-ip.com of my current IP address, and also run an SMTP server that feeds mail into POP mailboxes also held here.

Now... here at home I do the SMTP and POP stuff with Unixy things, and I don't know what software you'd use to do that on a Windows PC, but it can be done. Someone else can tell you what's good and what isn't.

Beware: if you run an SMTP server, make sure it only accepts mail *for your domain* and no others. You *do not* want to relay mail for someone else, really. You'll also want to send your outbound mail via your ISP, since it's common for broadband IP addresses to be blocked as sources of spam e-mail.

Here endeth the (probably incomprehensible) lesson.

>> Edited by Marshy on Saturday 29th November 15:49