Domain hosting query

Our current domain host Claranet is limiting our POP mailbox size to 100MB
from 30th June. This is not a problem during the day as we check and empty
it every 5 minutes but it's a different story at night and I can see us
hitting the limit and getting emails bounced which would not make us look
good.

Can anyone recommend a host without such a stupidly low limit? It needs to
be one catch-all mailbox. Anything@ our domain goes there and we sort and
send to individual users locally.

We don't need anything fancy on the webspace side, around 100MB should be
enough.

Cheers (and jeers to Clara for only giving us 28 days notice),

TMK

In article <h05q9k$ijr$(E-Mail Removed)>,
TheMongKey <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>Our current domain host Claranet is limiting our POP mailbox size to 100MB
>from 30th June. This is not a problem during the day as we check and empty
>it every 5 minutes but it's a different story at night and I can see us
>hitting the limit and getting emails bounced which would not make us look
>good.
>
>Can anyone recommend a host without such a stupidly low limit? It needs to
>be one catch-all mailbox. Anything@ our domain goes there and we sort and
>send to individual users locally.

Er - In these enlightened days, that's not really a good idea due to the
volume of "dictionary attack" spamms. Start at Aaron and end at Zebidee
@yourdomain.do.da. ..

So do you really need absolutely everything?

Gordon

Gordon Henderson wrote:
> In article <h05q9k$ijr$(E-Mail Removed)>,
> TheMongKey <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>> Our current domain host Claranet is limiting our POP mailbox size to 100MB
>>from 30th June. This is not a problem during the day as we check and empty
>> it every 5 minutes but it's a different story at night and I can see us
>> hitting the limit and getting emails bounced which would not make us look
>> good.
>>
>> Can anyone recommend a host without such a stupidly low limit? It needs to
>> be one catch-all mailbox. Anything@ our domain goes there and we sort and
>> send to individual users locally.
>
> Er - In these enlightened days, that's not really a good idea due to the
> volume of "dictionary attack" spamms. Start at Aaron and end at Zebidee
> @yourdomain.do.da. ..
>
> So do you really need absolutely everything?
>
> Gordon
Good point. Of course you can simply run your own SMTP server, or simply
leave the machine that collects it on 24x7..

> Gordon Henderson wrote:
> Er - In these enlightened days, that's not really a good idea due to the
> volume of "dictionary attack" spamms. Start at Aaron and end at Zebidee
> @yourdomain.do.da. ..
> So do you really need absolutely everything?

We have 90 users with at least three aliases each plus all the common
misspellings of their names, maiden names, name of the previous holder of
their position, etc. It's less bother to deal with the (very) occasional
dictionary attack than it would be to setup and maintain individual
mailboxes. And we'd still end up not getting email from some people who are
apparently unable to update their address books years after being told.

"The Natural Philosopher" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> Good point. Of course you can simply run your own SMTP server, or simply
> leave the machine that collects it on 24x7..

One of the reasons for using POP instead of SMTP is so that we don't have to
expose our internal server directly to the Internet. We'd rather keep it
that way.

Cheers,

TMK

TheMongKey wrote:
>> Gordon Henderson wrote:
>> Er - In these enlightened days, that's not really a good idea due to the
>> volume of "dictionary attack" spamms. Start at Aaron and end at Zebidee
>> @yourdomain.do.da. ..
>> So do you really need absolutely everything?
>
> We have 90 users with at least three aliases each plus all the common
> misspellings of their names, maiden names, name of the previous holder of
> their position, etc. It's less bother to deal with the (very) occasional
> dictionary attack than it would be to setup and maintain individual
> mailboxes. And we'd still end up not getting email from some people who are
> apparently unable to update their address books years after being told.
>
> "The Natural Philosopher" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>> Good point. Of course you can simply run your own SMTP server, or simply
>> leave the machine that collects it on 24x7..
>
> One of the reasons for using POP instead of SMTP is so that we don't have to
> expose our internal server directly to the Internet. We'd rather keep it
> that way.

well, just leave the single machine that connects to it on then.

I cant see how you can POSSIBLY manage 90 users on ONE mailbox though..

At least with clara you can set up 90 mailboxes and all the normal
aliases that might be used, and reject the rest with 'addressee not
known' or what ever.

When I first started my own domain I used to get FLOODED with email for
another company with a similar name. For two years I dutifully forwarded
all these on to them, and asked them time and again to get their
customers to use the correct addresses, and then to fix their OWN sender
addresses so they weren't in my domain.

They thought this was all my problem.

In the end, I cut the thing down to must me at my domain, and rejected
the rest with 'if you are looking for XYZ, the domain is actually xYZ'
and gave up.

Basically you are using the wrong tools for the job. If you HAVE a mail
server, it should be on 24x7, and it SHOULD be really running SMTP, not POP.

As far as making it inaccessible to the net in general, that's what
firewalls and mail rules are for. Almost any decent mailer will be able
to recognise 'apparently internal sender, but from external source', and
reject it as relay abuse.

Even if you stay with POP, the answer is leave the mail server on.



>
> Cheers,
>
> TMK
>
>

Thanks for your replies. There are reasons our setup is the way it is and I
don't really want to go into that any further. I'd be grateful if anyone can
answer my original question, however.

Cheers,

TMK

In article <h05v94$t2u$(E-Mail Removed)>,
The Natural Philosopher <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>TheMongKey wrote:
>>> Gordon Henderson wrote:
>>> Er - In these enlightened days, that's not really a good idea due to the
>>> volume of "dictionary attack" spamms. Start at Aaron and end at Zebidee
>>> @yourdomain.do.da. ..
>>> So do you really need absolutely everything?
>>
>> We have 90 users with at least three aliases each plus all the common
>> misspellings of their names, maiden names, name of the previous holder of
>> their position, etc. It's less bother to deal with the (very) occasional
>> dictionary attack than it would be to setup and maintain individual
>> mailboxes. And we'd still end up not getting email from some people who are
>> apparently unable to update their address books years after being told.
>>
>> "The Natural Philosopher" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>>> Good point. Of course you can simply run your own SMTP server, or simply
>>> leave the machine that collects it on 24x7..
>>
>> One of the reasons for using POP instead of SMTP is so that we don't have to
>> expose our internal server directly to the Internet. We'd rather keep it
>> that way.
>
>well, just leave the single machine that connects to it on then.
>
>I cant see how you can POSSIBLY manage 90 users on ONE mailbox though..

There are client-side program that suck in a POP box and squirt it into
an SMTP box - fetchmail in the *nix world and there are equivalents in
the Win world.

Gordon

In article <h061op$gom$(E-Mail Removed)>,
TheMongKey <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>Thanks for your replies. There are reasons our setup is the way it is and I
>don't really want to go into that any further. I'd be grateful if anyone can
>answer my original question, however.

Well, I do it for customers, but I really don't like it and an
not taking on any more who want to do it this way - why? Because of
"backscatter". You get a dictionary attack (and I see them daily FWIW),
and your mailserver bounces the email to the sender - and depending on how
your mailserver is configured, it might bounce it back to my mailserver,
or to some other, random mailserver with my IP address in it as the last
mail relay the message passed through, so my mailserver gets treated as
a spam sender.

Gordon

"Gordon Henderson" wrote:

> Well, I do it for customers, but I really don't like it and an
> not taking on any more who want to do it this way - why? Because of
> "backscatter". You get a dictionary attack (and I see them daily FWIW),
> and your mailserver bounces the email to the sender - and depending on how
> your mailserver is configured, it might bounce it back to my mailserver,
> or to some other, random mailserver with my IP address in it as the last
> mail relay the message passed through, so my mailserver gets treated as
> a spam sender.

Just to clarify - we don't bounce anything. Mail to unrecognised recipients
goes to an admin account and is forwarded or deleted manually. There is no
backscatter from us - not delivery or read receipts, NDRs, or even out of
office replies. Shame the rest of the Internet is not so careful.

Cheers,

TMK

In uk.telecom.broadband, on Wed, 3 Jun 2009 15:36:07, TheMongKey wrote:

>Thanks for your replies. There are reasons our setup is the way it is
>and I don't really want to go into that any further. I'd be grateful if
>anyone can answer my original question, however.

You could forward all the mail to a gmail account, and collect it from
there. The storage is unlimited for all practical purposes (> 5GB).
Purists may throw up their hands in horror, but it works, and their spam
filters are very good - and trainable!

--
Jim Crowther