Ask HN: Simplest email setup for slicehost-ed domain? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Simplest email setup for slicehost-ed domain?

#21

Post by jayroh » Sat, Jun 06, 2009, 10:40 PM UTC

timf wrote: post #2

Google Apps is free and fast to set up for mail@yourdomain.com http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html

Same. For Slicehost this is pretty much a given ... why waste your resources on processing and storing email when you can offload it to google?

Re: Ask HN: Simplest email setup for slicehost-ed domain?

#22

Post by callmeed » Sat, Jun 06, 2009, 10:49 PM UTC

mc wrote: post #16

nkohari wrote: post #8

If you're only interested in receiving email, Google Apps for Domains is great. If you need to send it (for example, as part of your service), you should check out AuthSMTP ( http://authsmtp.com/ ).

You can also use Google Apps for your Domain to send emails. I even wrote a Rails plugin for doing just that: http://github.com/openrain/action_mailer_tls There may be an outgoing limit, but I've personally never encountered it.

We actually send mail through Google Apps and our rails help ticket system. Just got hit with a sending quota the other day. Didn't get a number, just that we sent too many.

Re: Ask HN: Simplest email setup for slicehost-ed domain?

#23

Post by calvin » Sat, Jun 06, 2009, 11:55 PM UTC

mc wrote: post #17

If you do go with Google Apps for your Domain, you can use the following script (in Ruby) to automatically configure the appropriate DNS entries on Slicehost: http://github.com/postpostmodern/slicehost-dns/tree/master Run it from the command line and it'll setup everything for you.

I've used this script and it's saved me a lot of work. It reduces the time setting up DNS from 30 minutes (give or take depending on how many CNAMEs, A records, and MX records you need) to about 10 seconds.

Re: Ask HN: Simplest email setup for slicehost-ed domain?

#24

Post by oomkiller » Sun, Jun 07, 2009, 1:47 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #9

oomkiller wrote: post #7

Google Apps is a good way to go, but personally I prefer Dovecot and Postfix for my email servers.

I agree -- maintaining your own email server is no harder than maintaining a web server (or anything else). The default configuration of exim that comes with Debian works well enough for me. (Although I did need to tweak it to add spam filtering and support for my "legacy" qmail addresses.) I also buy DynDNS' backup MX service. That way, if I fuck up my server, I will get my mail as soon as the server is back up (ins…

I disagree that it's as easy as Nginx or Apache (webservers), but with Google, there are treasure troves of information about doing it yourself.

Re: Ask HN: Simplest email setup for slicehost-ed domain?

#25

Post by weaksauce » Thu, Jul 16, 2009, 7:53 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #9

oomkiller wrote: post #7

Google Apps is a good way to go, but personally I prefer Dovecot and Postfix for my email servers.

I agree -- maintaining your own email server is no harder than maintaining a web server (or anything else). The default configuration of exim that comes with Debian works well enough for me. (Although I did need to tweak it to add spam filtering and support for my "legacy" qmail addresses.) I also buy DynDNS' backup MX service. That way, if I fuck up my server, I will get my mail as soon as the server is back up (ins…

Great tip on the DynDNS backup service! Have you noticed any downtime or caveats from this service?