Where's the best bet for cheap domain name based e-mail hosting?

April 1, 2004 6:18 PM

Where's the best bet for cheap domain name based e-mail hosting? [more inside]

I used to host my blog myself, and have several domain names. I am using TypePad now, but retain my web hosting service just to do e-mail. But I want to save some cash there, so I need to find some place cheap just for domain name web hosting. I may consolidate all of my e-mail down to one domain, as I have it spread across several right now.

I tried the e-mail service my registrar (GoDaddy) offers, but I didn't like it.

Anyone have any suggestions?

posted by benjh to computers & internet (11 comments total)

Previous thread here.
posted by Danelope at 6:25 PM on April 1, 2004

If you used to host your own site, you might be comfortable with running your own mail server. I use the widely-used Postfix. (Caveat Emptor: Some MXs reject mail from DSL lines and what not. For sending mail, a remote SMTP server you can use might be needed to reach some people. I've only encountered this rarely.)
posted by thebabelfish at 7:02 PM on April 1, 2004

I ended up going with 1and1.com and am not terribly satisfied. The webmail side, if that's something that does or would interest you, is simply awful. Worst I've ever used. Using mail2web with pop is at least 4x faster. Also, the email package I got doesn't do real hosting, just forwarding: it does redirection within an invisible frame. So if you go to http://mydomain.com and then follow an internal link, the URL doesn't change. Always just http://mydomain.com, even if you click on a document or a directory.
posted by Sinner at 8:09 PM on April 1, 2004

If you register your domain someplace like directnic they offer pop3 for 10 bucks per year.

If you transfer your domain to registerfly for 6.99 you get pop3 and smtp both for free.

I have not use either of those.

Small packages offers their smallest plan for just 20 bucks a year. You only get a small amount of space but it includes email.
posted by justgary at 11:42 PM on April 1, 2004

I use ADTHosting for that purpose. $5 a month. customer service emails are usually answered within a few hours, always (in my experience) within one day.
posted by gd779 at 9:02 AM on April 2, 2004

parcom.net is $3.95 a month for windows based web-hosting with email accounts. Good service, too.
posted by internook at 9:11 AM on April 2, 2004

on the doing SMTP yourself thing - i really wish this worked (it seems to me that admins who block dsl addresses are soulless anti-geeks that have forgotten everything that's good about the internet), BUT i just ended up with a dynamically assigned address that had previously been used for spam (presumably it was a windows machine that had been owned) and it is no fun trying to get things working when you've been seriously blacklisted (dsbl won't unlist unless you have an MX DNS entry...). people were deleting my mail silently - turns out my parents hadn't been getting my letters home, people i worked with weren't getting my emails etc etc.

but anyway, what i now do is the following:
- exim on my linux server sends local mail to local mailboxes and external mail to my isp's smtp machine
- my web page provider receives email and stores it
- every 10mins or so i use getmail (pop3) to pull mail from the web page provider (across ssh)
- my own mail is filtered with procmail (inc spam filtering - reverse dns and spamassassin)
- i store mail locally in maildir format
- courier provides imap access to my stored email
- squirrelmail (webmail) and mutt (tty) let me read mail via imap

and if you want to go down that route i can share config files. the advantage is that you get more-or-less complete control over how you filter, sort and present your email, and every domain hosting company provides a pop3 mailbox. the downside, of course, is that it takes forever to configure.
posted by andrew cooke at 12:54 PM on April 2, 2004

Media3.com is running a promo offer right now, 12 months free on any of their Linux hosting plans. (Disclaimer: not affiliated with them except as one of the new beneficiaries of this offer.) So far my impression of their service can be summarized thusly: underwhelming but decent. For simple email hosting it'd probably be fine. On the other hand, for a few bucks more per month, many of the hosts cited above probably have comparable service plus a working install of SpamAssassin, which can make email much more usable overall.

GoDaddy is also advertising $9.95/yr per email account. (Just be careful during checkout, since their cross-selling makes it easy to end up with "extras" in the shopping cart if you try to click through without reading carefully.)
posted by nakedcodemonkey at 1:06 PM on April 2, 2004

I tried the e-mail service my registrar (GoDaddy) offers, but I didn't like it.

Oops. Never mind my GoDaddy reference.
posted by nakedcodemonkey at 1:11 PM on April 2, 2004

If you're going to pay 5 bucks a month, I'd go with pair.com.

They're the best (by far) I've used.
posted by justgary at 10:56 PM on April 2, 2004

Verve hosting has several email only plans.
posted by justgary at 12:09 AM on April 4, 2004