Mail is one of the hardest services to manage. Actually, mail is pretty simple in and of itself: there’s protocols people use to access their mail (such as IMAP and POP), protocols used to communicate between mail servers and send mail (SMTP, SMTPS) and then there’s a database of mail and user information. In Mavericks Server, all of these are represented by a single ON button, so it really couldn’t be easier. But then there’s the ecoysystem and the evil spammers. As a systems administrator of a large number of mail servers, I firmly believe that there is a special kind of hell where only spam is served at every…
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OpenDNS
Many people still use 4.2.2.2, 4.2.2.1, 206.13.28.12, 206.13.30.12, or some other arbitrary set of DNS servers. But, these are ISP DNS servers and so subject not only to filtration of source IP addresses at the will of the ISP (which happened back in the old Mindspring days) but also subject to spikes in traffic making someone’s Internet connection appear dog slow. So I’ve been putting people on internal DNS servers for a long time. But even they need to point somewhere for their DNS… Enter OpenDNS. These guys use 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220. They’re free for just doing Internet lookups and if you find you want them to do more for you, they…
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Dreamhost
So my buddy Eli told me about his web host, which I’m actually seeing a lot of traffic on various lists about so thought I should mention. His quote: http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting-panel.html Check out the demo panel, its pretty nifty. Still no better than running webmin/cpanel, but not nearly as obtuse because it allows Dreamhost to split roles onto several servers under one panel. Ie, Mail goes on one server, Web on another, MySQL onto another shared server, all under one set of admin pages. And although you cant mess with the shared host config settings, you are able to SSH in to your own account and run amok with your own files. Still, I like…