Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

Let me make a few recommendations. I'm not a sysadmin by trade but I know a few things you can do that will improve your lot in life running mail.

- Postfix and Dovecot. They have the right combination of ease of use, power and security. Don't overconfigure; try to get it working with basic settings first and then evolve it towards what you dream of rather than setting out to configure it that way first.

- SPF and DKIM. I have no trouble getting messages to Gmail and I think this is part of why.

- Make sure your hosting provider is not huge and very high quality. I chose RootBSD because they're small but highly technical. If you have a lot of spare cash, iNetU are quite good and sometimes help with FreeBSD. The larger or crappier the host is, the more likely you'll wind up in blacklisted IP space. (BSD hosting companies tend to be smaller and more technical, and BSD is great software, so I'd recommend that if you're interested.) Getting off a blacklist isn't a lot of fun and it's not hard to wind up on one, but I find being on a discriminating host is a good preventative measure.

- Rely on IMAP. If you want webmail, try and find one that is really just an IMAP frontend. I tried and liked Roundcube a while back; these days I have IMAP clients everywhere so I don't know what the new hot stuff is, but IMAP is fantastic.

- I strongly recommend you get an account with DNSReport.com. Their software can detect most of the DNS problems you can get yourself into that wreak havoc with mail. Odds are good you'll be doing a lot more DNS than before, it's a great tool to have in the toolbox.

- Stay on top of your security updates. I recommend running sshguard and whatever other security software/IDS/firewall type stuff you can stand. Make sure you're not giving out a bunch of shell accounts with root on this server. Seems obvious, but people forget or get lazy. FreeBSD will email you a security message every day; if something like that isn't coming your way, consider trying to set it up. It tells me, among other things, who tried to log into the server, how many times they failed, what their IP was, and lots of other stuff.

There are a number of nice upsides to running your own mail server.

- Email can be hooked up to the database various ways.

- Automatic emailing for free (keep an eye on it).

- Scripted email handling for free (Procmail etc).

- Get system-generated messages emailed (Nagios/monit etc., login/sudo failures, etc.)

- Advanced forwarding/wildcard accounts.

Anyway, I hope you do give it a shot despite the nay-saying. Cost-effective? No, but it's a blast, and many of the upsides would be hard to replicate with Gmail. Of course the web mail UI will be worse. Tradeoffs.

It's pretty easy actually but when authorizing GMail to add a new sender address it usually mails a verification code to that address. Which, in this case would come back into the same Gmail inbox.

So if you have a X@Y.Z forwarding to A@gmail.com, then the verification code would be sent by gmail to X@Y.Z, which in turn, due to your forward settings, would redirect all mail to A@gmail.com.

The difference is that when sending mail from your Gmail.com inbox as opposed to the Google apps inbox for X@Y.Z is that when you send a mail via gmail (even if you fake the sender), the signed-by field will contain "gmail.com". On the other hand, Google apps for domains will set the signed-by field value to "Y.Z" (which would be your domain name).

As far as I know, this is the only difference. In Gmail, you can even set the default sender-address as your custom domain address so you don't need to set it everytime you reply to/compose new emails. And, unless you think/feel that signed-by: domain.name is cool, you're not really missing anything.

Why? I have two VPSs with the main and backup SMTP servers and with continuous replications of emails between them and I pay less than half. Not to mention they double as web servers, IRC bouncers, etc.

And no matter what I did to reduce spam, about 10 messages a day always made it through.

I probably never get the same traffic as you do, but to me the best decision I made was enabling catch-all and using different addresses for each service out there.

In my case, spammers only send to three types of addresses:

- Random (jumble of numbers and letters@mydomain): very easy to block with a couple of programming lines.

- Fake but plausible (support@, bob@): just blacklist them once.

- Leaked (from websites and such): same as above, nuke it. Only happened to me once.

All in all, I never had to set up SpamAssassin or deal with dropped emails because of untrusted sources. Blocking by destination is much cleaner.