Any recommendations for IMAP e-mail hosting?

September 15, 2007 11:31 AM

Any recommendations for paid IMAP e-mail hosting?

My needs are fairly basic -- just a catchall address for a personal domain name -- but I'm looking for a service that is extremely reliable, values user privacy/security, doesn't have any ads, and won't go out of business any time soon. (I use Mail.app for OS X if it makes any difference.) Thanks!

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

I don't know about extremely reliable (they had a bad outage last year, but seem to have developed their infrastructure in response to it), but fastmail has IMAP and is very configurable to use different domain names, etc. Is that what you're looking for?
posted by anthill at 11:39 AM on September 15, 2007

Lots of webhosting providers offer secure imap. e.g. ASmallOrange has a basic account for $5 usd/month. (i think there is an even smaller one, but i haven't used it.)
posted by kamelhoecker at 11:58 AM on September 15, 2007

This comment serves as the required mention of Dreamhost in any of these sorts of threads.

However, I've gotta say - as much as I love Dreamhost ... they do a lot of things really well, but IMAP isn't one of them. They seem to have a lot of trouble with mail (like, a >2 hour downtime at least every couple of weeks).
posted by dmd at 12:30 PM on September 15, 2007

Other nice points for fastmail:

- Really affordable ($40/yr for their enhanced account).
- They have a pretty good online community if you run into problems.
- Pretty good Smam filtering, w. SpammAssassin and (recently) user-trainable Bayes Databases.

I've used them for around 3 years and have been happy. As anthill points out: Their reliability has not been 100%, but they've been working hard on it. It's been reliable enough for me - nothing like, say, the weekly 2 hour interruptions that dmd describes for dreamhost (I might feel different if I was one of the users who was hit hardest by the big outage last year, but I was one of the lucky ones...)

In terms of still being around: They've been around for a while, but are still, I assume, a pretty tiny company compared to s web host shop like dreamhost. That has pros and cons.
posted by ManInSuit at 12:36 PM on September 15, 2007

I've used fastmail for years (for personal and business mail), and has the same impression as ManInSuit. The fm guys know the stuff. It's a place completely devoid of the marketing fluff seen elsewhere.
posted by flif at 1:24 PM on September 15, 2007

Another rec for fastmail. I can't remember when I last noticed downtime although I was also lucky not to be part of the big outage last year.
posted by yarrow at 2:06 PM on September 15, 2007

I've found that when I offload my mail hosting to some smaller company who offers IMAP support, it always leads to lots of downtime and stupidity. I always come back to rolling my own, and finally got to the point that I know enough about how to do it that it requires no maintenance, and so I've got uptime of almost two years now with no outages.

So if I were you, I'd pay a little bit more for a larger, more stable company who has IMAP support under control and isn't just getting by. I can't point you to a specific company that does that, but my experience does tell me that you should stay clear of every company people mention here that "have some downtime, but" and the like.
posted by davejay at 2:10 PM on September 15, 2007

Fastmail, fastmail, fastmail. I use it for my personal and professional email account. At $40 a year, it's a steal.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 2:32 PM on September 15, 2007

webmail.us is great (but has a minimum of ten mail boxes)
posted by mac-way at 4:10 PM on September 15, 2007

Fusemail.com

I've been using it for years. As the name suggests, fusemail "fuses" all your other accounts into one. Fusemail is able to download mail from Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, Pop, IMAP and other proprietary account types, into a single account, but you can still send as any one of those accounts. They also do mail for domains. Very useful.

The only issue is the price now. I don't understand their new pricing model. I pay $17 a year, but it looks like it will run you about $60 if you sign up now.
posted by bumper314 at 5:41 PM on September 15, 2007

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone -- I've decided to give fastmail a try.
posted by Ø at 9:23 PM on September 16, 2007