Yes, it's a pain finding a good mail provider. I occasionally think the only way I'll ever find one I'm completely happy with is to be my own mail provider – buy a domain, get a colo machine (or, I suppose, a Xen slice of someone else's), and point the former's MX record at the latter.
I come close to this in my main personal mailbox (which isn't on the same machine as yours, because my account on that one is not practically usable as my main mailbox for similar reasons to you), because the sysadmin has let me take an active role in maintaining the system's anti-spam setup, and in particular we recently set up a mechanism of per-user SMTP-time filters, so I can reject whole classes of email in a quite draconian fashion without having to worry about the effect on anyone else. (Such as email written in foreign alphabets, which when sent to me is 99.9% spam and even if one or two were legitimate I wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway; so rejecting the whole lot with "554 Regrettably I only speak English" deals handily with a lot of my spam and actually improves the experience of anyone who genuinely thought it would be a good idea to send me real mail in Chinese.)
However, that setup is non-optimal in one or two ways, notably that it doesn't permit me to do anything about bounces. I'm currently funnelling all incoming bounces into a folder I never read, because otherwise they'd swamp me. This means I won't see real bounces, and I hate that, but there's honestly no way I'd find them in among all the crap even if I tried. So I'd quite like to experiment with things like signed return paths so that I can reject the enormous number of phony bounces and bounces of forged mail and only let through bounces of things I really sent (with the added benefit, of course, of allowing other systems to detect forged me-mail if they do SMTP callouts); but the sysadmin doesn't like those systems so I probably won't get to use them unless I migrate elsewhere.
Then there's the question of my primary email address, which isn't the same thing as my mailbox: around 1998 I paid actual money for a long-term account with a commercial mail forwarder, on the basis that my physical mailbox seemed (and indeed was) liable to move repeatedly and I wanted to have a long-term address so my correspondents didn't have to keep track of what it was this week. I'm rather regretting that decision too; if I had it to do all over again I'd have registered a domain rather than getting a forwarder address in somebody else's, because then there isn't another MX between me and my correspondents.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2006-11-22 12:19 pm (UTC)Yes, it's a pain finding a good mail provider. I occasionally think the only way I'll ever find one I'm completely happy with is to be my own mail provider – buy a domain, get a colo machine (or, I suppose, a Xen slice of someone else's), and point the former's MX record at the latter.
I come close to this in my main personal mailbox (which isn't on the same machine as yours, because my account on that one is not practically usable as my main mailbox for similar reasons to you), because the sysadmin has let me take an active role in maintaining the system's anti-spam setup, and in particular we recently set up a mechanism of per-user SMTP-time filters, so I can reject whole classes of email in a quite draconian fashion without having to worry about the effect on anyone else. (Such as email written in foreign alphabets, which when sent to me is 99.9% spam and even if one or two were legitimate I wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway; so rejecting the whole lot with "554 Regrettably I only speak English" deals handily with a lot of my spam and actually improves the experience of anyone who genuinely thought it would be a good idea to send me real mail in Chinese.)
However, that setup is non-optimal in one or two ways, notably that it doesn't permit me to do anything about bounces. I'm currently funnelling all incoming bounces into a folder I never read, because otherwise they'd swamp me. This means I won't see real bounces, and I hate that, but there's honestly no way I'd find them in among all the crap even if I tried. So I'd quite like to experiment with things like signed return paths so that I can reject the enormous number of phony bounces and bounces of forged mail and only let through bounces of things I really sent (with the added benefit, of course, of allowing other systems to detect forged me-mail if they do SMTP callouts); but the sysadmin doesn't like those systems so I probably won't get to use them unless I migrate elsewhere.
Then there's the question of my primary email address, which isn't the same thing as my mailbox: around 1998 I paid actual money for a long-term account with a commercial mail forwarder, on the basis that my physical mailbox seemed (and indeed was) liable to move repeatedly and I wanted to have a long-term address so my correspondents didn't have to keep track of what it was this week. I'm rather regretting that decision too; if I had it to do all over again I'd have registered a domain rather than getting a forwarder address in somebody else's, because then there isn't another MX between me and my correspondents.