When a Decades-Old Email Provider Used by Millions Suddenly Goes Down (bluescreencomputer.com) 84
Mail2World hosts mailboxes for 2,150,000 different domains, according to its web site, offering both "free, reliable email for everyone" and a $29.99-a-year "premium" service with a terabyte of storage (instead of the free level's 25 gigabytes), an ad-free inbox, and "premium"-level support.
"We appreciate your understanding as we work to fully restore email service as soon as possible," reads their most-recent tweet — from Thursday.
Slashdot reader C4st13v4n14 is not a happy customer: Since Tuesday evening local time, I haven't been able to access my primary email account. This is an alumni email account I've had for the last 22 years that's tied to all my accounts ranging from not only social media and IOT devices, but also banking, access to health services and contact with local and countrywide government authorities.
My country is highly digitised and virtually everything from taxes to buying or selling a house, paying bills, access to health records and correspondence with hospitals and GPs, driving licences, applying for welfare, and starting a business are online. I don't even get snail mail anymore, everything is sent to a digital mailbox I can access through a browser or app with two-factor authentication. Fortunately, all access control for public-facing services is via two-factor authentication or smartcards with secure certificates for the highly sensitive stuff.
Regardless, the ordeal has been quite distressing as I was unable to find any information about the outage; a little detective work was only giving vague ERR_CONNECTION_RESET and DNS errors. My main thought was that my account had somehow been compromised and even more worryingly, there were no reports online about it. Turning to Reddit, I was able to gather that the provider, Mail2World, had suffered a ransomware attack but had been very uncommunicative about the event. In terms of news coverage, there was basically none. Only one random news site had a short article about it. During the days without access, I was painstakingly moving accounts to my Gmail address and updating contact information for the really important stuff like governmental services. This morning, I got a tip that Jesse over at BlueScreen Computer had reached out to Mail2World and has been documenting the outage.
Since then, some email has started to show up in my mobile app and I'm able to access the web portal again, but I can't help but feel like the damage has been done. This is an account that I pay an annual fee for and have trusted to work until now. I also find being kept in the dark about something so fundamental in today's world like email to be both very concerning and completely unacceptable. In that regard, I'm hoping this will bring some coverage to the event.
I would also like any input you Slashdotters have on migrating to and navigating Gmail. The interface is unfamiliar to an old-school user like me who still uses Eudora to check and save a backup of everything.
By the way, I'd should also like to point out that both POP and SMTP are handled by servers at pangia.biz, and their website has also been unreachable during this. Instead of Gmail, maybe you would recommend a different provider or service altogether? My work email is fortunately completely separate as of a couple years ago and handled by one.com as they host my website. It works, but they aren't anything special really.
It's interesting to imagine the scope of this particular outage. "Our company's growing list of customers includes prominent organizations from around the world," brags the Mail2World web site, "such as publicly-traded corporations, leading academic institutions and some of the largest and most-recognized service providers."
But long-time Slashdot reader OtisSnerd has experienced even worse: This happened with Newsguy.com's email and NNTP offerings back in early September. I had my email address with them for 25 years, and my wife's email for almost 22. It turns out that Newsguy went chapter 7. Luckily we were using pop3 with MS Outlook, so we both still have all the old email. I already had another email account elsewhere, but my wife didn't. Took days to get all her changes made.
"We appreciate your understanding as we work to fully restore email service as soon as possible," reads their most-recent tweet — from Thursday.
Slashdot reader C4st13v4n14 is not a happy customer: Since Tuesday evening local time, I haven't been able to access my primary email account. This is an alumni email account I've had for the last 22 years that's tied to all my accounts ranging from not only social media and IOT devices, but also banking, access to health services and contact with local and countrywide government authorities.
My country is highly digitised and virtually everything from taxes to buying or selling a house, paying bills, access to health records and correspondence with hospitals and GPs, driving licences, applying for welfare, and starting a business are online. I don't even get snail mail anymore, everything is sent to a digital mailbox I can access through a browser or app with two-factor authentication. Fortunately, all access control for public-facing services is via two-factor authentication or smartcards with secure certificates for the highly sensitive stuff.
Regardless, the ordeal has been quite distressing as I was unable to find any information about the outage; a little detective work was only giving vague ERR_CONNECTION_RESET and DNS errors. My main thought was that my account had somehow been compromised and even more worryingly, there were no reports online about it. Turning to Reddit, I was able to gather that the provider, Mail2World, had suffered a ransomware attack but had been very uncommunicative about the event. In terms of news coverage, there was basically none. Only one random news site had a short article about it. During the days without access, I was painstakingly moving accounts to my Gmail address and updating contact information for the really important stuff like governmental services. This morning, I got a tip that Jesse over at BlueScreen Computer had reached out to Mail2World and has been documenting the outage.
Since then, some email has started to show up in my mobile app and I'm able to access the web portal again, but I can't help but feel like the damage has been done. This is an account that I pay an annual fee for and have trusted to work until now. I also find being kept in the dark about something so fundamental in today's world like email to be both very concerning and completely unacceptable. In that regard, I'm hoping this will bring some coverage to the event.
I would also like any input you Slashdotters have on migrating to and navigating Gmail. The interface is unfamiliar to an old-school user like me who still uses Eudora to check and save a backup of everything.
By the way, I'd should also like to point out that both POP and SMTP are handled by servers at pangia.biz, and their website has also been unreachable during this. Instead of Gmail, maybe you would recommend a different provider or service altogether? My work email is fortunately completely separate as of a couple years ago and handled by one.com as they host my website. It works, but they aren't anything special really.
It's interesting to imagine the scope of this particular outage. "Our company's growing list of customers includes prominent organizations from around the world," brags the Mail2World web site, "such as publicly-traded corporations, leading academic institutions and some of the largest and most-recognized service providers."
But long-time Slashdot reader OtisSnerd has experienced even worse: This happened with Newsguy.com's email and NNTP offerings back in early September. I had my email address with them for 25 years, and my wife's email for almost 22. It turns out that Newsguy went chapter 7. Luckily we were using pop3 with MS Outlook, so we both still have all the old email. I already had another email account elsewhere, but my wife didn't. Took days to get all her changes made.
This can happen to any online service (Score:5, Informative)
It's all online, and even though some have redundancies, in reality any online service can go down and just stop working. Going with Gmail is fine - until the day it stops working for some reason. I've had that happen 3-4 times over the years.
Re:This can happen to any online service (Score:5, Interesting)
As a side note, if they have had 22 years of uninterrupted service, that's MORE reliable than Gmail has ever been.
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I run my own email servers and DNS servers with appropriate redundancy.
If you want to use a provider, at least have your own domain name hosted there for your emails and do backup of all your IMAP emails folder locally. You simply set the provider you want to receive your email mail exchangers (MX) to the provider IPs.
I think getting your own domain name from godaddy is $10/year or something. Having your own personal domain name for emails will allow to quickly reroute your emails to another provider if you
Re:This can happen to any online service (Score:5, Insightful)
>I run my own email servers and DNS servers with appropriate redundancy.
I do too. The trouble is, this is getting harder and harder to do lately because pretty much all hosting providers, cloud providers and so on have their netblocks marked as spam sources. It's extremely difficult to host a machine or VPS on a "clean" IP address these days.
It only takes one bad actor on your provider's network and suddenly all the E-mail you send is marked as spam by everyone. This has happened with most providers and ISP networks. It's a crap situation.
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It only takes one bad actor on your provider's network and suddenly all the E-mail you send is marked as spam by everyone. This has happened with most providers and ISP networks. It's a crap situation.
That's not your problem. That's the problem of the receivers. They should vote with their money.
I've been hosting my own stuff since 1997. Spammers use my domains often as a "from" address. Occasionally, someone reports that Google, Microsoft, or other clueless idiots mark my email as spam and they have to look in their spambox to find my emails.
Their problem. I generally don't "cold mail" people. When they complain, I tell them that if their service marks legitimate mail as spam, they should call the s
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It only takes one bad actor on your provider's network and suddenly all the E-mail you send is marked as spam by everyone. This has happened with most providers and ISP networks. It's a crap situation.
That's not your problem. That's the problem of the receivers. They should vote with their money.
I've been hosting my own stuff since 1997. Spammers use my domains often as a "from" address. Occasionally, someone reports that Google, Microsoft, or other clueless idiots mark my email as spam and they have to look in their spambox to find my emails.
Their problem. I generally don't "cold mail" people. When they complain, I tell them that if their service marks legitimate mail as spam, they should call the service, not me. I'm doing nothing wrong.
It's not your fault, but if people you email don't get see your messages then it is your problem.
I've been hosting my own email since 2005 (yeah, I'm a noob) and I'm using my gmail more and more because I don't want to worry if my message got through.
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>That's not your problem. That's the problem of the receivers.
It is my problem if I want them to get the messages! Why do you think I would be sending them anyway? Just for fun?
>I generally don't "cold mail" people. When they complain, I tell them that if their service marks legitimate mail as spam, they should call the service, not me. I'm doing nothing wrong.
That's fine and all but it is still a problem for you to handle these complaints, is it not? And an even bigger problem that a bunch of peop
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Indeed it has become harder, you can always configure a smart relay host, I have several and when say, outlook.com refuses my emails, I just switch to another smart relay host specifically for outlook or masquerade with another IP. Outlook is about the only one I sometimes get problems delivering mail with because most mail systems whitelist my IPs whatever else other IPs do on the same IP block. I never had a single problem delivering mail to gmail nor other ISP providers for example. Outllook is a pain to
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What makes you think the spam blocks will decrease? If you could reliably use IPv6, so could spammers, resulting in spam blocks being erected for large swathes of the IPv6 space.
The only thin
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It's extremely difficult to host a machine or VPS on a "clean" IP address these days.
I have some dedicated servers from Kimsufi (some personal, some professional), which is apparently popular with spammers. Whenever I first get a new machine and setup a mail server, I inevitably find that the static IP address assigned to my server is on a few blacklists*. I email (through my new dedicated server) the blacklist maintainers, and briefly explain my situation. Within a day, my IP address is removed from the blacklists, and I'm able to freely send emails from my new server.
I've been doing this
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The bigger problem are the 600lb gorillas like Google and Gmail, who *might* bless you with Inbox deliverability to gmail customers.
Google has scooped up an absolutely massive amount of email traffic over the years, unfortunately.
At least with providers like MSN/Hotmail/etc you can request an IP whitelist. Google has no such friendliness and you just have to send emails to gmail friends and have them go in and mark "not spam." It's frustrating and was a huge huge problem for me when I had to move to a new I
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I've hosted my own email forever, but have tended to use services for outbound that have clean IPs. It's a little less self-sufficient but also eliminates the lack of receipt problems. I recently migrated to Amazon SES which isn't too hard to integrate into postfix. Should only cost me cents a month, and it works fine. My domain provider also provides a similar service cheap should I ever need it as a backup.
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All you have to do is have your gateway send mail out via your service provider. Create a new user/password and incorporate it into your configuration. Just make sure you're not an un-authenticated relay or you'll be in trouble. Spammers seem very good at finding open relays.
Also, implement dkim.. and all the other stuff. I used sendmail for over 30 years. Uunet days. It seemed to me like they don't even care anymore so I switched to postfix.
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You just need your own dedicated registered domain name for your emails. :P
As you already pointed out you need much more: the knowledge how to set it up and maintain it
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Well if you buy a car, most people will assume that you have the knowledge to drive or that you will have somebody driving it for you. Same for maintenance. I also set and maintain domains for my customers but they own it themselves so I am easily replaceable. I guess that's the idea! :)
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Really? I've been using Gmail from the very start and don't recall it ever being down. I read it went down for a few minutes one time, but I was asleep.
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As a side note, if they have had 22 years of uninterrupted service, that's MORE reliable than Gmail has ever been.
I will bet you a kidney that they haven't. The thing is email (especially pop / imap) is only "down" if there is an overlap between a user trying to access the service at the same time as it being unavailable. For brief periods gmail has been down (with it's push service and integration into everything google services and devices) most email outages of the more classic variety would go completely unnoticed. My own email could have been down for 23 hours and 55 minutes today, and I wouldn't have noticed.
Outa
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Good thing something that's a human right [wikipedia.org] and a utility [publicknowledge.org] is as reliable as one.
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>Speech, Right to defend yourself, etc... but the primary thing is that they don't take hard labor from others to provide it to you.
If you don't think freedom of speech took hard labor from others to provide to you, you are living in a fantasy land. That is not to say it is not a human right.
Regards.
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My solution is to have my own domain. I can redirect the mail anywhere I want. Of course the domain host might have an issue, but their service being down won't break the DNS entries that are cached everywhere.
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I set low TTLs on all my DNS entries, including MXs. It helps in reacting quickly.
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Careful when doing that, anybody stupid enough to still be using SORBS to the rules that the SORBS assholes have decided are best for the internet will ding you for that. Low TTL = spammer to them.
SORBS should have fucked off and died ages ago but it's still around, unfortunately.
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Going with Gmail is fine until they decide to spring shitty 2fa on you at the most inconvenient of times, you have one phone on you and want to access your email but they've decided it's a new f**king device and have sent a message to some other device you don't have with you so you're shit of of luck for reading your email now. I like mail.com because it doesn't have 2fa and my because my email address is my-first-name@email.com [Smug_mode_on].
Or Amazon's stupid fucking security where they say we'll send a
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Thanks for the tip of "mail.com". I'll look into it.
I've tried to avoid near-monopolies like Google, but my new-ish job foisted me a gmail.com email. I'm not happy about it because they used my full name without asking me.
I have not been forced to do 2fa, and I don't think I gave them a 2nd factor. A warning email does appear in the inbox whenever I log in with a different "device", and often this happens on the same "device" (I hate that word) maybe because it's on a dynamic IP address? I don't know.
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I was ranting about forced 2fa that Amazon does once they have your mobile number. I'm not a phone addict and I get pigged off when companies use phones for 2fa.
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Right with ya! I hate it and won't give phone number out. More and more companies are using phone numbers as account numbers! I can't buy on Rock Auto because they insist on a phone number. I've had many problems on ebay for same reason. You can buy something, but when you try to pay you get a big error popup that says "phone number required to complete transaction".
And it's not just privacy; in my mind, especially with cell phone proliferation, phone numbers are fungible. I've had 4 phone numbers in
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Totally agree. I just lost a Gmail account that I've had for 10 years because they refuse to let me log in again until I give them my phone number for 2FA. I tried using one of the SMS receiving numbers [smsreceivefree.com], but I think Gmail has them all blacklisted.
Companies cannot use your SSN for unique account information, so they determined that most people keep their phone numbers longer than they keep their physical or email addresses and decided to use that instead. It's just another reminder that the "cost" of usin
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Instead of being less secure, you could just set up a secondary 2FA option to use. There's nothing stopping you having one per device.
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I'm talking about times when I'm not at home, I'm out and about and just have one phone with me so 2fa becomes a total pain-in-the-arse.
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That's what I'm talking about too. Just put an authenticator app with time based code on there.
Wait... You aren't using SMS for 2FA are you?
How cute (Score:2)
>an old-school user like me who still uses Eudora
How cute that he fancies Eudora to be "old-school".
Mail and mh are old school.
Screen based clients like mutt are *almost* old school.
Anything with a guy, well . . . just get off my lawn, newbie!
Use your own domain for email (Score:2)
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No, even with your own domain, you can have outages for the same sorts of reasons, like if your ISP goes down, your DNS goes down, you lose power, hardware failure, etc. And if you're on vacation, you might not have anyone else to fix it.
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Redundancy for emails is one of the most simple simple thing to achieve. See my other post here:
https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org]
I have DNS in three datacenters. They are mine but nothing keep you from hosting your DNS at several providers and set some as slaves.
If my ISP goes down, I can easily fail over to another one.
thats nice (Score:1)
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mail2world was used with own domains. By the looks of it they messed up with their DNS servers. ;; ANSWER SECTION:
xxxx.xx. 300 IN MX 10 mx1.xxxx.mail2world.com.
xxxx.xx. 300 IN MX 10 mx2.xxxx.mail2world.com.
xxxx.xx. 300 IN MX 10 mx3.xxxx.mail2world.com.
Last week mx#.xxxx.mail2world.com. lookups were failing.
GMail? (Score:2)
Look, I use GMail. It's very reliable, with a simple enough interface, and just works. But there are heavy privacy concerns which come as a package.
Personally, I accept that, in exchange for convenience of use, etc., etc.
However, if I were to look for a brand new e-mail provider, I would look at self-hosted e-mail. Yes, it's a PITA, but I would have full control over it.
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What kind of grief? I use Apple's email client to access Gmail with practically zero issues.
I have a grandfathered GSuite account hosting my own domain for free so it is difficult to find a compelling reason to switch to something else. Privacy issues? Sure - but you have to assume any email that is not encrypted can be read by someone somewhere. I gave up trying to persuade correspondents to use email encryption a long time ago.
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However, if I were to look for a brand new e-mail provider, I would look at self-hosted e-mail. Yes, it's a PITA, but I would have full control over it.
I would recommend looking at some of the other very good, very inexpensive e-mail services like FastMail, Tutanota, ProtonMail, etc. Lots of good options that are very cheap. Also it's extremely easy to move between providers should you need. Personally I'm happy paying FastMail $5/mo instead of dealing with the headache of running my own e-mail service. Been there, done that, for years, do not want to do it again. You will spend hours per month dealing with it.
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Look, I use 1984.is - It's very reliable, with a simple enough interface and just works. There are very few privacy concerns.
You don't always have to give up privacy for convenience.
Either way, using your own domain name is a good way to remain "provider agnostic" should you want to switch away from anyone, no matter how good they may be today, should they turn rubbish in future.
I used to use mail2world, actually - I left them because at the time, there was no way to use your own domain with them (something
When aol.com and hotmail.com die... (Score:5, Funny)
...A lot of Civil War veterans around here running their old CD-installed "portals" on Windows 3.11 machines are going to think their world has come to an end. I will have to break it to them thatere isn't any "floppy for Gmail" they can upgrade to.
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Hotmail now redirects to outlook.com.
I had a Hotmail address BEFORE Microsoft bought them. I still use it for MS related stuff.
What's that old idiom? (Score:2)
Something something eggs something something basket....?
Digital mailbox? (Score:2)
That sounds like a snail-mail scanning service. Yeah, two-factor sounds great for the front end, but frankly the real security concern is with the people actually doing the scanning - the guys who have physical access to your mail.
Ironically, you can't set up.... (Score:2)
Other than that one annoying quibble, gmail is perfectly usable.
Avoiding this... (Score:3)
1. Don't use proprietary apps. Use the Internet. You can find another email app when you want it (or need it).
2. Don't use IMAP, use POP3. Email provider down? OK, switch to another one. The provider shouldn't be keeping your mail.
3. Be in charge of your own DNS. (I'm NOT saying run your own DNS server, but instead keep control of your own domain name). If you let someone else control your domain (i.e. you get a "free" domain from your web host, rather than buying and configuring your own domain) you're stuck with what the true domain owner gives you. (I went through this wringer 20 years ago. Hard-won knowledge). If you own your own, point it at another email provider tout de suite (if you paid attention to 1 and 2 above).
Re:Avoiding this... (Score:5, Informative)
It did happen to me that a domain and IMAP provider I used pretty suddenly went out of business. No big deal, moving the MX record to another provider only took 30min of work and about 1 day until it was effective.
And of course, I could easily retain the locally mirrored emails from the previous account which remained offline.
Re: Avoiding this... (Score:2)
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I agree with 1. and 3., I disagree with 2.: IMAP also allows to mirror all your emails locally - of course I use that - and it is still much faster and better than POP3.
There is one danger with IMAP that POP3 does not have: If your hosting company experiences a critical disk problem or indexing failure and (temporarily?) loses your mail data on their side, you have a problem. The second you either launch your mail client or your mobile phone does a scheduled mail check, it will perform an IMAP sync. It will then think that all local messages have been deleted from the server, and immediately purge all your local messages to match the mailbox on the server. No recycle bin
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Be in charge of your own DNS. (I'm NOT saying run your own DNS server, but instead keep control of your own domain name). If you let someone else control your domain (i.e. you get a "free" domain from your web host, rather than buying and configuring your own domain) you're stuck with what the true domain owner gives you.
@jddj - for us young'uns who only know how to go to GoDaddy or random host providers, how *do* you do this in today's world? Honest question, as I got a domain name I really like as part of one of those "free domain from web host" deals, and I'd like to make sure it's not permanently tied up with them when & if I do want to change providers ...
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Be in charge of your own DNS. (I'm NOT saying run your own DNS server, but instead keep control of your own domain name). If you let someone else control your domain (i.e. you get a "free" domain from your web host, rather than buying and configuring your own domain) you're stuck with what the true domain owner gives you.
@jddj - for us young'uns who only know how to go to GoDaddy or random host providers, how *do* you do this in today's world? Honest question, as I got a domain name I really like as part of one of those "free domain from web host" deals, and I'd like to make sure it's not permanently tied up with them when & if I do want to change providers ...
I use namecheap. I have no business relationship with them, except as a satisfied customer.
Namecheap can sell you domain name registration, TLS (nee SSL) certificates, a few services (and yes, can be your host, I suppose, but that's not the way I'd go).
You tell Namecheap (or your own choice of domain name registrar) that you want to transfer your domain name registration there. (They have a lot of docs on how this is done - I'm doing this from memory, and they may do it differently now).
Your new domain name
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> 3. Be in charge of your own DNS. ;; ANSWER SECTION:
xxxx.xx. 300 IN MX 10 mx1.xxxx.mail2world.com.
xxxx.xx. 300 IN MX 10 mx2.xxxx.mail2world.com.
xxxx.xx. 300 IN MX 10 mx3.xxxx.mail2world.com.
people were in change of own DNS. But MX is pointing at mail2world dns this was borked last week.
Re: Avoiding this... (Score:2)
So if they're in charge of their own, they can go find another host, no problem, right?
Work email (Score:1)
Yes, they could still get access to their accounts using their cell/mobile phone, but weren't getting any notifications via email.
Idiot should have changed their email address on the accounts as soon as possible or have created them using a personal account in the first place.
You can use Thunderbird with Gmail (Score:3)
While the Eudora email client hasn't been updated to work with the newer security that gmail uses, Thunderbird works once you set gmail up to allow it. I seldom use the web mail except to report spam to Google.
As for gmail, if you're not enough of a nerd to roll your own email server, it's actually a pretty good service, indeed I'd rate it among the best free services. The spam filters in particular are remarkably good. Even my mom's account, which gets hundreds of spam emails every month, only occasionally has one slip through.
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As I wrote above, I try to avoid near-monopolies like google, but my new-ish job foisted me into gmail. Sigh.
Yes, gmail works well with pop3 and imap clients, as you mentioned probably need to be up-to-date with security protocol and certs. I've been using "Claws-Mail". I picked it because it's very cross-platform. Not sure I like it but it's "good enough". I like Thunderbird, but there was something about it (that I don't remember) that I didn't like at the time.
One good thing about gmail: my Android
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Thunderbird now supports Gmail's authentication, so you don't need to configure anything in Gmail to make it work now. No IMAP, no app passwords.
Very helpful, but.. (Score:2)
Re: Very helpful, but.. (Score:2)
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I use dreamhost for my domains. Some people don't like them but I've never had any complaints. They were very responsive the couple of times I've had to reach out for support but n the 15 or so years I've used them.
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I can recommend Fastmail. http://www.fastmail.com/ [fastmail.com] or if you want to say "thanks" you can use this affiliate link: https://ref.fm/u773335 [ref.fm]
I'm not shilling for them because of affiliate kickbacks... I've been using them myself for more years than I can remember. They've always treated me well and I've been very happy. It's nice actually having "support" when one needs it for email.
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Maybe namecheap.com? I have some domains registered with them, but they also provide email for your domain if you transfer it to them.
Gmail? Are you serious? (Score:1)
Get your own domain (Score:2)
Even if you don't feel up for running your own mail server in-house, this is reason enough to at LEAST use a custom domain. That way you can switch email providers easily and your email address doesn't need to change.
Doing so has saved my butt more than once.
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Indeed. There are many name registrars that will also host DNS and email for you if you want. Usually, you can still point that DNS someplace else (the the whole domain to host your own DNS or just the targets in your domain) and hence can use your own MTA if you want to.
Gmail user since day one (almost). (Score:3)
I've used Gmail since it was invitation-only and hosted my own domains with google mail when it was still in beta and have no plans or desire to change.
Yes, Gmail supports POP3 & IMAP, and I've used all the major email clients, but I truly prefer the Gmail web interface. Enable and learn the keyboard shortcuts and I can navigate & get thru my email far faster than any client I've ever seen. It's portable no matter which computer I'm using and there are excellent apps for Apple & Android, so I can use any phone or tablet. I've experienced very little downtime, and those don't last very long; no extended outages like you are experiencing.
I'm a retired Linux/Unix sysadmin, and I've hosted my own email in the old days, but that is far too much work and time for domains that only myself and my wife use. I have NO desire to put my life on hold and spend hours/days working on my servers(s) every time a vulnerability like log4j is discovered. I also have NO desire to go back to a clunky email client. And even if I did run my own servers, that means I'd have to rely on a hosting service for my virtual machines, and hosting companies can have the same problems as any email hosting company.
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I'm a retired Linux/Unix sysadmin, and I've hosted my own email in the old days, but that is far too much work and time for domains that only myself and my wife use. I have NO desire to put my life on hold and spend hours/days working on my servers(s) every time a vulnerability like log4j is discovered. I also have NO desire to go back to a clunky email client. And even if I did run my own servers, that means I'd have to rely on a hosting service for my virtual machines, and hosting companies can have the same problems as any email hosting company.
I really do not know what you are talking about. I have Postfix as my own MTA and so far I had no emergencies and very little maintenance in the last 10 years or so I have been doing it. Sure, I use mutt as email client, but doing a pop2/IMAP would not be hard either. As to problems, that is why you run a secondary MTA with a different provider in a different geographic location.
Just remember... (Score:3)
Any time you're using someone else's service, be it for email or whatever, you there is always a risk. they may become insolvent. They may have experience hardware failure with no working backups. They may have one guy who held all the keys to the kingdom who suffers a heart attack and no one else has the access to maintain it. They may decide that it's not worth their time/effort anymore and discontinue the service altogether -- Who knows?!
With email, you kind of are at the mercy of hosting companies. It is very impractical to try to host your own since most of the large providers won't accept email's from servers running on residential ISP IP blocks or dynamically assigned addresses, courtesy of three decades of spambots. But if nothing else, you may want to consider registering and using your own domain name for email. That way if shit really hits the fan at least you give yourself the explicit ability to ditch your existing email provider and repoint your domain to a different host without being held hostage or being kept in the dark forever
Of course the single point of failure of the domain registry remains no matter what, so I'd strongly suggest registering the domain and DNS with one of the big guys instead of saving a buck and going with a discount registrar.
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Most places will allow residential mail servers. It's not easy to get them to cooperate. I have to go through that BS with Comcast every so often. Something is reset. Now I have to get through tier-1 and they're idiots. They're told they don't do that. Then tier-2. Then I finally get the real technician who can often fix it in a minute. Colonoscopy or deal with comcast to reset the e-mail? About the same thing.
To send just use a new user/pass associated with your ISP's account. All you have to do is put it
email provider (Score:1)