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Advice on email hosting solutions that can accommodate lots of old email?

rkent — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:15:54 -0800

Looking for advice on email hosting solutions that can accommodate lots of old email. I'll describe some of my particular "desires" below, but maybe more than a specific host / solution, I am looking for ideas on how to best manage my email situation. I have medium-lots of old email, on the range of 15G or so, that is going to get evicted soon from my current independently hosted IMAP/Webmail host. I would like to integrate this massive pool of email rather smoothly with whatever I do going forward.

I want to say that I am interested in IMAP going forward, as well as webmail, as well as shell access so I can manually tarball and SCP my archives to backup. And I do want these things, as far as it goes. But more to the point I realize I've been stuck in an email rut, which I am about to get kicked out of regardless, and so I'm also interested in general advice on how to make this easy going forward, and if there are any other factors I should maybe be considering. If I'm going to make a big switch anyway, maybe I shouldn't just look for something as close to the old host as possible. Although any cheap IMAP/shell-access compatible solutions, with a fair bit of storage, will be graciously welcomed. Thanks for any advice.

My current folders are in Maildir format and I have full access to all files, folders, etc, if that is relevant to your recommendation.

blogging via iphone = win

almostmanda — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:59:15 -0800

I need an alternative to Gmail that does pop3 without SSL, and won't expire after so many days of inactivity. I'm trying to set up my wordpress install to do posts-by-email. To do this, I need to set up an email account that only myself and my co-blogger know about. Wordpress allows support for this and will access a POP3 account for you and post contents, but it doesn't currently support SSL, so a new gmail account is a no-go.

Any suggestions for a webmail provider that will do POP3 without SSL, will stay up reliably, and won't expire if we don't log in for such an amount of time? (I guess expiration after a couple of years would be OK, but Fastmail's 45 days is a little short). Things like ads and interface don't really matter since we ideally won't be checking it, but the provider can't be selling the address to spammers or sending us service updates either.

There's some workarounds with old wordpress plugins, but I'd like to not have to worry about getting them to work and updating them. Also, I'm not really interested in setting up my own email server or using my ISP.

Can I legally log into an employees webmail if they left their password on a company computer?

procrastination — Mon, 19 May 2008 07:17:24 -0800

Say I have an employee who was using a company computer. They departed under bad terms. I suspect that they took proprietary and valuable company documents with them when they left by sending them to themselves or someone else using a webmail service. If I can recover their webmail password from the company computer they were assigned, is it legal for me to log in and check to see if they did this? Why or why not? This is in the United States. My understanding is that employees have no expectation of privacy on company assigned computers. This is a semi-hypothetical question, since I am not about to do it, but I am working on a forensics case where the possibility might come up. I will definitely check with a lawyer, probably the one who hired me to do the investigation, and if it seems legal and they want it done, will ask for a letter of indemnity from them. I know you are not my lawyer and will not construe your answers as legal advice.

How do I simplify my email accounts?

jefficator — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 09:33:07 -0800

How can I make Gmail retrieve email from my university's webmail service? I've tried following the directions given by Gmail and searching for the answer online, but every time I attempt to have Gmail fetch my mail, the error "connection timed out" is given. Is there anything I can do to make simplify my email life?

Need Email Hosting (Blackberry & WebMail) - NOT Microsoft

DerekTheGeek — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 19:40:20 -0800

I am looking to find an email hosting provider that supports a decent “webmail” client and also Blackberry “push” email. From what I have seen, the majority of email hosting providers, that support the Blackberry, make use of Microsoft Exchange, which I am trying to avoid. These are the things I am looking for... 1. Good "webmail" client - Browser based client to read/manage my email/contacts/calendar 2. Blackberry "push" email synchronization (including calendar and contacts) 3. Does not use Microsoft Exchange ( I cannot stand Outlook Web Access) 4. Price < $10/month per Mailbox Thank you for any assistance.

free webmail pop HTML-mode

randomstriker — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 22:45:34 -0800

Free webmail with HTML mode, allows embedded graphics, does not have embedded advertising, and retrieves POP mail? Need it only for a month. I'm on the organizing committee for an event in mid-July, and have to use their email account to coordinate with other volunteers.

I'm behind a firewall at work so I can't retrieve by POP/IMAP or send by SMTP. However, the head of the organizers wants us to use a GIF logo in our signature for consistent branding. The webmail interface to the email account only supports plaintext and no embedded graphics.

Is there are free webmail service that can satisfy my needs? A free trial would be fine if it lasts for the next month -- unfortunately I've already exhausted my free-trials with Yahoo! and Hotmail. No embedded advertising.

Good webmail for phones

migurski — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 11:24:26 -0800

Webmail IMAP client: like SquirrelMail, but smaller, for a mobile phone? My new phone (S/E w810i) does "email", in the sense that it can talk to a small range of pre-selected partners like Yahoo or AOL. I'm looking for a web-based IMAP client that I can use to access my own IMAP server. It should be something along the lines of MIR, but that allows writing mail as well as reading it. I like SquirrelMail a lot, but it doesn't have a non-framed, minimal view.

Webmail Without PHP

ursus_comiter — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 09:31:25 -0800

Non-PHP based webmail? Does anyone have experience implementing a robust non-PHP webmail system for an IMAP and/or POP3 server?

I used to run IMP for a server I'm in charge of, but the PHP setup was compromised and I've since taken it down. I'd like to restore webmail for my users but I'm not going to use PHP again. I'm looking for something that'll provide webmail with SSL that'll be secure and relatively easy to maintain. I'm amenable to open source or to a commercial product. It'd have to work on solaris or Mac OS X.

How can I get my webmail back?

fermion — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 08:57:28 -0800

All the email in my Lycos/Mailcity account was deleted when I left it inactive for too long. I am willing to go to great lengths and spend considerable amounts of money to retrieve it. Can anyone give me suggestions on how to go about this? Yes, I ought to have gone to great lengths to damn well back it up, but this option is lost to me now and I'm trying to do damage control.

I've had the account for several years. I stopped using it very much a few years back, but I signed up for one of their extortionary "Account Preservation" paid accounts to keep it on their servers, since it contained many old messages of very great personal significance (including correspondence from now-deceased friends.)

Today I logged in to discover that my paid account had expired (it may have been charged to an old/inactive credit card) and reverted to a free account, and then deleted when I didn't log in for 30 days.

I am planning to throw myself upon the mercy of the help desk (there is no contact information listed on the site, just an option to open a support ticket) with explanations of the direness of the situation and offers to pay exorbitant amounts of money if they'll restore it from backup or something. What else can I do? Does anyone have contact information for departments/persons at Lycos who might be able to help me? Are there other strategies I can try? I realize my hopes are slim, but any help is very much appreciated.

PHP:or:Ruby Webmail program I can hack?

hatsix — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 08:57:21 -0800

I'm looking for some sort of Web-Based-Mail system that I can install on my server that I would be able to interface through PHP or Ruby. Specifically, I'd like to build a little web-based application that I can use to catalog my day-to-day business communications. I'd record phone calls and faxes by hand, but have all of my email automagically loaded into the system by interfacing with this webmail program.

I am NOT looking for "just do it in outlook" responses, First, I don't trust MS Products' stability with my business data, Second, I'm planning on building on tools such as billing, budget, etc...

TIA!

How can I access my webmail via a ssh tunnel?

seinfeld — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 08:37:25 -0800

How can I access my webmail via a ssh tunnel? My corporate firewall started blocking ports 2095, 2096, and 2082, but I can ssh to the box that is hosting my domain. I used to access my webmail via https://domain.ext:2096/ but no longer can. My host runs Linux and my desktop machine is Windows. How do I properly set up an ssh tunnel so I can access my webmail via the web and not using lynx from within an ssh session?

I tried using putty and L2095 <> localhost:2095 and same for 2096, but to no avail. Perhaps I was doing something wrong.

Thanks for the help.

Is it possible to set up Hotmail to only display unread messages?

goodnewsfortheinsane — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 08:26:56 -0800

Is it possible to set up Hotmail to only display unread messages? I tend to keep some messages unread for some extended period of time (mostly "hey check this out" stuff), and when I clean out my inbox I have to dig very deep in the past to weed them out.

Gmail for my old mail?

bonaldi — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 12:00:01 -0800

Gmail-like interface for my old emails? I have tons (GBs) of old emails, going back to 1992. I've pretty much got them consolidated now into mbox format and I'd like to have some sort of searchable web interface for them, much like gmails. I know Mail.app does searching, but that ties me to one machine, which is boo.

As far as the interface goes, I love gmail's searching and especially the conversation view.

Is there anything that will do what I want? At my disposal I've got an OS X server, a Sun server, and hosting space on Dreamhost.

(PS: I know about uploading scripts for gmail, but they a) get the date wrong and b) will take a very long time with this amount of email)

Help me find a personal email venue that my employer can't block.

Haize — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 18:53:03 -0800

My employer blocks access to webmail-based email like yahoo and gmail. Is it possible to get around this? Really, I just want a personal email address that I can access at work. There is no set policy against personal email at work that I can find, but they seem to block every webmail portal I can think of (gmail, hotmail, yahoo, anything with "webmail" or "mail" in the URL). I know why many employers choose to do this (security, productivity), but I really just want to check mail at lunch. Suggestions?

Can I redirect a webmail-only email account?

O9scar — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 08:31:45 -0800

Is it possible to screen scrape or somehow redirect a webmail-only account? For stupid reasons our school has restricted email this way and I'd really like to reduce the amount of email accounts I have to keep track of. I guess some clueless student was shunting all of their forwarded school email to their spam folder. So now we can only access it via webmail. No POP or telnet. Is there some way of grabbing the mail that I can do transparently? I run Tiger on my laptop, if it matters. I prefer Safari, but I do have Firefox as well.

What tools do you use for web self-hosting?

gurple — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 10:51:14 -0800

I'm getting sick of the limitations of my web hosting provider, so I'm striking out on my own. I think I've got the hardware, OS (some linux flavor) and webserver (Apache) figured out, but what about apps? I'm looking for good, free webmail and photo-gallery software, and any other tips.... Webmail: There are four of us using email on my current domain. Currently my hosting provider gives me Horde, which I like. But are there better apps out there?

Photos: I'm currently thinking of Gallery for photo hosting.

Any tips on those two apps, or any other apps that you've found useful, would be appreciated.

Sorry if this is a double post -- it seems like this would have been covered before, but I poked around a bit and didn't find anything.

Starter resources for white hat/grey hat hacker skills?

namespan — Mon, 30 Aug 2004 12:15:11 -0800

I'd like to learn some white hat/grey hat hacker (as in cracker) skills. I'm interested in focusing on Windows systems and possibly web mail, as I think knowledge in these areas would probably be the most marketable. What's a good resource to pick up the basics? What are some good websites to follow the discovery and status of vulnerabilities?

Webmail

ralawrence — Thu, 27 May 2004 03:35:38 -0800

Where I work has suddenly become all fascist about internet access and blocked SSH access. This is a pain because it was how I used to access my emails (SSH in, use Pine). I can't use a POP3 client on my PC because they've had that port blocked for ages. I'm currently using mail2web but don't like the way it handles replies and the general lack of functionality. My question is: is there a good free webmail application out there that is either managed (like mail2web) or I can install in my account (Linux, no db access, no root). If the latter can cope with the folders I have (I use spamassassin), safely render HTML emails (possible junk mail) and is easy to install, then that would be excellent. I have tried Google and Freshmeat but all the ones I saw were either commercial or looked rather featureless. Any recommendations?

Russian Web Mail

Pericles — Fri, 07 May 2004 04:24:01 -0800

Anyone know of a russian-language equivalent of Hotmail/ yahoo / free web mail for a technophobic russian friend? Bonus points for advice on how to type cyrillic using English keyboards, as she'll be using public library computers.

I can log in to my webmail and send mail, but I can not view the inbox. Is this common? What is the solution?

gd779 — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 14:31:33 -0800

1and1 Webmail problem: For the last several days, the webmail for my domain at 1and1 has been inaccessible. Specifically, I can log in, and I can send email, but I cannot view my inbox. More inside. For the past several days, webmail access to my domain has been unavailable. Specifically, I am able to log in and send email, but I am generally unable to view my inbox. When I try, I get the following message: "One moment, please. Loading e-mails... If you run into trouble, please use your local mail client."

The screen can stay like that for hours. On the few occassions when, after a very long delay, my inbox has become visible, I get a similar message after trying to check an individual email. I have reproduced this behavior on multiple computers and from multiple networks, using IE 6. Using a local email client is, unfortunately, not an option for many users of this domain.

I have two questions: First, is this specific to my account or are others experiencing similar problems? (I know that, like me, many MeFites grabbed the free promotional domain at 1and1). Second, does anyone know what might be causing this or how it might be resolved?

Thanks in advance.

Webmail troubles

NekulturnY — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 09:11:56 -0800

Webmail troubles: my ISP was bought out by another ISP and recently my ADSL connection migrated from the one to the other.

For my work, I use a webmail, because they can't or won't make POP mail available for the work account. Since I migrated, it became impossible for me to reply to mails, add new contacts and some other stuff. I can still send entirely new emails, but it's a hassle not to be able to just reply and forget about it.

The webmail works fine from other locations, but not on my partner's laptop, which is sharing my internet connection.

The ISP claims that 'absolutely nothing' changed and it's not their problem. The IT guy at work isn't terribly interested. I think I might convince either of them to act if I know exactly what the problem is. Can somebody crack this for me? Thanks.

Cheap Webhosting

Sinner — Tue, 27 Jan 2004 12:24:54 -0800

What's the best very cheap web- and email-hosting provider? Most packages are geared for small business, but this is for a personal site, so the web-hosting part of it is secondary to my primary purpose of using a less generic domain name (hotmail/yahoo don't cut it).

What I want is a solid combination of reliable pop and webmail at a domain of my choosing, with ~50MB space, for less than $5/month. I'm currently considering doteasy.com and netfirms.com, and doteasy is winning but for the 20MB space they provide.

ADA-Compliant Webmail

answergrape — Tue, 20 Jan 2004 17:03:21 -0800

I need to find an ADA-compliant webmail interface. I'd prefer a free option that will allow POP3 and (preferrably) IMAP access. Hotmail is not an option since they no longer allow access to external POP boxes and Yahoo is out because of spam. Any suggestions?