E-mail server troubles

I notice that today the e-mail server is down and there's an announcement about it. However, I have to vent a bit because for me the e-mail server seems to stop responding for a few minutes or so every couple of days. I never opened a ticket before because it usually cleared itself up after a couple of minutes and I could wait.

However, I'm now switching ISPs and don't plan to use the e-mail provided by my new ISP. I'd rather have my primary e-mail be at my own domain so it's portable when I switch ISPs. Trouble is, I'm not sure how stable the e-mail here is. I recall seeing many a forum message about problems with it.

My question to the folks that run it is, in your opinion how stable is the e-mail service here? I understand that your primary focus is .NET application hosting, so if you say "e-mail isn't really our thing, you might want to check elsewhere" I'd understand that. I'd just like to know from your point of view, is it worth shelling out more $$ per month to a dedicated e-mail hoster or do you consider your service stable enough to be a primary e-mail system for an individual or small business?

Thanks.

 

Jamie,


In a few days we have a formal announcement planned regarding email, but since we ran into yet another issue this morning, I will give you and the rest of our forum users a little preview of the news now.


We have been testing the commercial email system SmarterMail for some time now, and after a thorough evaluation and comparison with our existing system, we have decided to move to the SmarterMail platform.


SmarterMail is an established system used by many other large Windows hosting providers. They have some really interesting ideas and have established a history of reliability that makes them a perfect fit for us. We think you will be pleased with their system.


This isn't something that will happen immediately for most of our users though. The first phase of the rollout will be provisioning new accounts on the SmarterMail system (that is scheduled to start as soon as tomorrow, but we have to finalize some documentation first). Once we have enough new accounts on the SmarterMail platform to get the usage data we need, we will enter an opt-in phase of deployment, where you can choose to have your mail services migrated to the new system. Finally, we will migrate all remaining customers and retire the current mail system. The final migration is probably several months off, so everyone will have plenty of time to prepare.


This is a major move for us, so we did not enter into it lightly, which is why you may have seen mentions of email "improvements" for some time now here in the forum, without any details about what that actually meant.


So to answer your question, "do you consider your service stable enough to be a primary e-mail system for an individual or small business?" - yes, we do, but we recognize it's deficiencies and are taking the above mentioned steps to ensure that we can offer the best possible email service.


mjp

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Thanks for that information. I feel much better about using the e-mail services here now. It's good to hear that you're taking steps to make your e-mail system as rock-solid as your web hosting.

I looked into the features of SmarterMail and it looks pretty good. Do you know if access to the list server functionality will be available to us? Also, any idea if the domain forwarding feature will be used in conjunction with your domain pointer add-on to allow e-mail addresses on a secondary domain (added via root domain pointer) to be forwarded to a matching address on the primary domain?