On Tue, Sep 10, 2019 at 12:48:17AM -0500, David Loyall wrote:
On Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 12:37 AM tallship@tilde.team wrote:
Yes, gmail is like that. I recommend against anyone using it [...]
Agreed. Had the domain and service for .. wow like 15 years?
15 years? That would make you an early adopter, perhaps, and if what you're saying is that you have your domain pointed there, you're using what they now call GSuite.
Originally, this all started as a product by two dudes who worked for Microsoft in the office division, who wanted to build a collaborative editing capability for MS Office, like what we have today with 'CODE' (Collabora Office Developer Edition for NextCloud/LibreOffice).
So these two guys created 'DocuVerse', which aside from being something for Microsoft products was actually really kewl! But alas, along came Google and acquired it, EOLed it, retooled it, and launched Google Docs from its ashes. But I digress...
So If you've hosted your domain with Google for 15 years then you should be grandfathered into GSuite for free, with what was originally either 50 or 100 seats (I forget), if it wasn't that long ago then they eventually lowered it to 10 seats (users/email addys) for free, and you and everyone you set up accounts under still has access to gplus too :) I like gplus, but it was better when there were actually people there lol.
So here's a trick you can do ;) swing your DNS elsewhere for your MX RRs (I'll cover that in a bit). Now all of your mail will go to that other place, but... you can still log into your Google account and send mail from your account and it will arrive everywhere (because who would dare to put Google SMTP servers into an RBL?). You won't receive anything in that GSuite email account (Your MX RRs point elsewhere, and that's where mail will go), but you can still use that familiar gmail interface to send mail if you so choose.
Pretty kewl, huh?
Now, I'm not gonna gig anybody for having a hard time keeping a VPS or any server up and secure. It can be more problems than someone should want to endure, but if you look around over at WHT you'll see all kinds of providers that offer shared cPanel hosting for single domains for maybe 10 bucks a year. Check their ratings, ask about them on WHT or google for reviews, and make sure they've been around for a while - that will tend to translate into them being around for a while longer ;)
That should suffice for your email. And you get webhosting too which you can use or not.
If you do want to hone your skills at attempting to maintain your own box, You can check over at LEB for specials that providers run all the time for like, $12/yr for OpenVZ VPS systems with like, 256 or 512MBytes RAM and one core. I don't like OpenVZ myself but that's because I believe in no brain no pain (You have a shared kernel that is fixed under a CentOS host). So no kernel compiles, and if you do any sort of custom firewalling you'll find that you can't install modules you need, etc., but if you just stick with standard vanilla stuff you can run a mail server just fine. All the really big providers out there that offer webhosting VPses and charge you rates for cPanel or Plesk servers starting at 50 bucks a month are actually only giving you crappy OpenVZ servers anyway - I know, because I've contracted out to some of those places - like GoDaddy and subisiaries. i.e, they'll give you the same server that you could get for 5 or ten bucks a month from a quality provider like BuyVM.net (example of a provider that doesn't oversell their OpenVZ VPses). Of course, a cPanel license now is $20/mo. But at least it's your server and that comes with dedicated support from cpanel.com.
[non-]disclaimer: I do not represent or have any current affiliation with any of the companies mentioned above.
I can't host my email off my home connection and I have not managed to keep any VPS etc up to date...
Cheers, --sebboh
Yah, it isn't as draconian as it used to be before ISPs got busted for messing with people hosting their own services at home, but It can still be less than ideal and often, it isn't worth the hassle.
I hope that helps :)
Kindest regards,
Bradley