You might think that as one of the largest web hosts in the United States, DreamHost would want its customers to use its own email service. You’d be wrong to think so, however. Since May 2008, the company has encouraged its users to switch to Gmail for their email needs.

In a blog post, Dream Host co-founder Josh Jones stated, “Just over HALF of all the support requests we get are about email… It’s just not something people are looking for from us, and it’s something the big free email providers like Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google can do better.”

So rather than improve its own email system to make it more user friendly, DreamHost has opted to outsource it to Google. This is a great cost-cutting measure and it’s nice that the company is giving its customers more options. But I think the real underlying problem here is that DreamHost isn’t as user-friendly as it could be.

The company may have improved since I switched to a different host several years ago, but from my experience, the DreamHost control panel is hard to use. I remember it being very slow and arranged in a very illogical fashion. As DreamHost half-heatedly admits, their email service wasn’t easy to set up. Instead of copping out by switching to Gmail, the web host should fix what was broken in the first place.

Continue reading: Web host encourages clients to use Gmail

Question: I have spammers sending multiple email messages to my mail server. How can can I limit the number of emails they can send in a given amount of time?

Answer: This is a trick that many spammers and malicious hackers will use to flood your server with their nonsense. Although a spam blocker will certainly help, it still has to process each email. If thousands of emails are sent an hour, that takes up valuable CPU power, memory, disk space, and time.

Postfix mail server allows you to limit the rate of incoming emails, keeping the spam messages from flooding your server. To configure it, edit /etc/mail/main.cf:

# nano main.cf (or vi main.cf)

Add the following directives:

smtpd_error_sleep_time = 1s
smtpd_soft_error_limit = 10
smtpd_hard_error_limit = 20

With these settings, after a client has made 10 connections, Postfix will pause and delay the next connection. If the connection is made 20 times without delivering mail, Postfix will disconnect.

Source: nixCraft

Continue reading: Limit the incoming email rate in Postfix

Microsoft Outlook is a great desktop mail client for at home or in the office, but what if you are using a computer not configured for Outlook access and need to check your mail? When this happens, Outlook Web Access (OWA) is a good alternative.

Originally called Exchange Web Connect (EWC), OWA is simply a webmail client designed to look almost identical to Outlook. It lets you check email, calendars, contacts, and more. Older versions require Internet Explorer, but the latest version will also work with Safari, Chrome, and Firefox.

Unfortunately, not every Outlook user can use OWA. In order for it to work, you must have a server with Microsoft Exchange installed. Most companies using Outlook should have this, but personal users will find themselves out of luck.

Continue reading: How read Outlook mail via web

Question: How can I use cPanel to forward emails sent to addresses in my domain to another email address?

Answer: The web-based control panel called cPanel makes it easy to create email forwarders. A forwarder allows you to setup any number of virtual email addresses within your domain and then forward emails sent to them to one or many different addresses. Just follow these simple steps:

1. Login to cPanel.
2. In the “Mail” section, click “Forwarders”
3. Click “add Forwarder”
4. Where it says “Address to Forward” enter the part of the email address that comes before the @ symbol. This should be a prefix that does not already exist as a real email address.
5. In the dropdown menu, select the domain name (if you have more than one).
6. Under “Destination” you can forward emails to an internal or external address, discard and return an error message, or “Pipe to a Program”, meaning that a script will handle the emails.

That is all it takes. Now email sent to the address you specified will automatically be forwarded wherever you want.

Continue reading: How to setup email forwarders in cPanel

An SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server is primarily used for sending email messages between servers. Most email systems use SMTP servers. But are there free servers for this task?

Free SMTP Server is a Windows program that satisfies that need, and it is very easy to use. Furthermore, it is particularly useful for laptop users who travel frequently and connect to Internet service providers from various countries. Using your own SMTP server gives you much more security.

Richard Stallman, founder of GNU (component of GNU/Linux) and the Free Software Foundation explained that the only way to be certain of the privacy and security of your email accounts is to host them yourself. This is probably not practical for the average person, but for a few individuals and certainly companies with security concerns, this is a real option. Free SMTP works with Outlook Express and Eudora. If you are interested, you can download directly from the project’s website and give it a try for free.

Continue reading: Where can I find a free SMTP server?

Question: I am noticing some problems with my email server, Postfix. Is there a way to track emails?

Answer: While you should definitely not use this for purpose of spying, it is sometimes necessary to track all emails on a server, even if you have multiple users on it. Sometimes the enemy may be within, and someone sending abusive emails on your server can put everyone else’s websites in jeopardy.

Using the “always_bcc” setting, Postfix will send a blind carbon copy of every email to an administrator of your choice. This, of course, will generate a lot of email for that account, so the best thing to do is to create an account just for that purpose. Edit the Postfix main.cf file and add the following line:

always_bcc=harvestadmin@yourdomain.com

To get it started, you will need to reload postfix with:

postfix reload

Soon, that account will start receiving everything. Good luck finding the cause of whatever problem you have.

Photo: Flickr

Continue reading: Tracking emails with Postfix

Question: How do I stop crontab from sending me emails after a cron job finishes?

Answer: In Linux the default setting for crontab is to send an email to the owner after a cron job finishes. An easy way to change this is to reroute those emails into nothingness, which in Linux is a directory called /dev/null.

Just append a pipe to it at the end of your command like so:

/usr/bin/command >/dev/null 2>&1

That will do the trick. You can enter it from the command line or through a control panel, if it supports cron jobs.

Photo: Flickr

Continue reading: Getting rid of crontab emails

Email forms are a common way for hackers to send spam. If you use email forms such as Matt’s script (often known as FormMail) or other similar mail scripts, your server could be vulnerable to attacks. If you have clients or simply other users creating sites on your server, you might not even know if you have these scripts. To find out, you can run this simple command:

find / -name “[Ff]orm[mM]ai*”

To check for CGIemail scripts, try this command:

find / -name “[Cc]giemai*”

Finally, to disable the sending of emails from the forms, enter:

chmod a-rwx /path/to/filename

This last command will completely lock user permissions to the script, so if you have a customer or user of a VPS who utilizes one of these form scripts, be sure to contact them and give them ample warning before proceeding. You should offer them a safe and secure alternative, leaving your customers happy and your server secure.

Photo: Flickr

Continue reading: How to defend a virtual private server from hackers

Question: How do I manually setup email aliases in Linux?

Answer: Generally speaking, there is probably no reason for you to modify your aliases file manually. In some cases, however, a script will require you to edit the file, and it is important to know where it is and how to access it.

On a dedicated server, the Sendmail or Postfix aliases file is almost always located in /etc/mail/aliases. To edit the file, you can use vi or my preference, nano.

$ su

# vi /etc/aliases
or
# nano -w /etc/aliases

The aliases file is rather simple to use. It is presented in columns with the aliases on the left and the file or mailbox that it points to on the right.

For example,

billing: callcenter

You must edit the file as root and then run the following command also as root:

# newaliases

Photo Source: Flickr

Continue reading: Email aliases file in Linux

One of the many features that comes in any web hosting package is free email hosting. By simply routing a domain’s name servers to a web host, one can set up email accounts on the domain.

It’s amazing how many people do not take advantage of this feature. Having a yourname@yoursite.com email is not only more professional, but also helps differentiate you from the crowd.

Sometimes the amount of space allowed in an email account and the number of accounts is limited by the host. Regardless of this, you should have ample space. If you haven’t considered hosting email on your domain before, why not give it a shot?

Photo | kveselyte

Continue reading: Take advantage of free email on your domain

A number of hosts these days offer unlimited email accounts. While this can be very useful for websites with many staff members, you may not be able to send out bulk email. In an effort to conserve precious bandwidth and CPU usage, some web hosts have banned the sending of bulk email to large numbers of users.

While such a measure does help prevent abuse, it can be a huge hassle to administrators of sites with thousands of registered users. There are third-party services out there that will handle bulk email separately, but these cost extra and do not integrate with sites.

Your best bet is to read the fine print before signing up with a host and predict your needs ahead of time. If your host restricts bulk email and you want to send out a gardening newsletter monthly to twelve people, you should be fine. Multiple that number by 100, however, and you could run into problems.

Continue reading: Does your host allow bulk email?

In a rare victory for the little guy, a domain arbitrator has ruled that Kraft has no right to Oreo.nl, which the company recently filed a dispute over.

J.C. van Winkel registered Oreo.nl in 2000. He uses the name for his personal email, but never set up a site with it. With the recent introduction of Oreo cookies to the Netherlands, however, Kraft decided it wanted the name, claiming that van Winkel’s use violated its trademark.

Though Kraft certainly has rights to the Oreo name, the arbitrator ruled that the corporation could not prove that van Winkel had no rights to the domain, either. In other words, both parties had a legitimate interest in Oreo.nl, but van Winkel was the early bird who got the worm.

This case is interesting because, unlike others in the past, the arbitrator ruled that email constitutes valid use of a domain. Just because a domain doesn’t have a site associated with it doesn’t mean the owner has no rights to it.

Source | Domain Name Wire

Photo | Flickr

Continue reading: Kraft loses dispute over Oreo.nl