Re: [PLUG] Mail hosting

I'm involved with an organization that is moving in that direction for
reasons that seem to amount to no more than 'wow - Google'.

That reminds me of when I worked at the dot bomb mail provider - many of the business types felt the same way about the Exchange server. I tried to understand what it is they wanted that our other much less expensive services was lacking and the only real conclusion I got was shared calendaring and how it integrated with Outlook - and of course the people advocating it just loved Microsoft - I think that was because they thought MS could leverage its near monopoly to a lot more than its various OS platforms and believed the stuff about MS ending spam etc... The price of Exchange was 10-15 times higher than our sendmail/custom filtered/policy controlled system and a much less reliable mail system - it didn't make a lot of sense to me. I think the current Wow factor is part of the same type of thing - this time part of it is Google is currently a big winner in the stock market. But this time it makes more sense to me since Google has a lot to offer and it is a lot more reliable than Exchange.

It appears CCIL can continue to use it's LDAP authentication and it will sync with Google, create accounts etc.. This way CCIL can continue to have its dialup and/or other stuff like web hosting controlled from one system. From the user perspective Google Apps improves CCIL's service by offering easier spam filtering, shared calendars, google docs, instant messaging, setting up a nice iGoogle start web page etc ... At the moment I think CCIL should continue to host Mailman for the mailing lists, the web pages, shell access (maybe require copies of photo ID's for shell access) and offer more stuff like php and Mysql databases. As Google offerings change it is likely to get better, and I might change my mind about what CCIL should do. But that decision isn't up to me, I got the impression that they would like to move everything except the dialup, in that case sticking with LDAP authentication would be a good thing.

>From a user perspective and as the former admin at CCIL I think Linuxforce has improved the mail service quite a bit from where it was. They have instituted a somewhat unusual point scoring system with multiple DNSBL and that has proven quite effective, but they took forever and a day to upgrade spamassassin and I don't think it has been updated since the migration to the latest stable Debian release. CCIL is getting these services from LinuxForce for cheap compared to what it would normally cost a company with 2000+ user mail boxes, so I would bet the regular paying business clients getting better service - which is as it should be. I should say I might work for LinuxForce in the future and once all the issues are considered LinuxForce could be an excellent choice!

Google has a lot to offer for the cost, it's free for CCIL so its not really going to be a totally fair comparison of what Mr Helledy wants for gra-inc.com. And it would be helpful to know some more details of what the company wants. For example, Mr Helledy mentioned subfolders, Gmail labels and subfolders can be a bit awkward, with IMAP you can have subfolders, but it's just a label and there are no sub labels in Gmail. I like the way labels work better than mail folders since it allows multiple labels without multiple copies in different folders, but I might change my mind if I start using IMAP to backup some mail.

I read that recently Google has noticed a significant reduction in the amount of spam and that other mail providers had not. The speculation is that the spam filters are so good the spammers aren't wasting their time. Having very large scale mail system like Google and some of the best experts in the world is certainly a big advantage in fighting spam. For viruses and worms it is even more important since a user is much more likely to be protected when the next big outbreak occurs, Google will likely have virus definitions updated as fast as anyone. Google beats both what I would have done at CCIL as well as what LinuxForce in what I call the "Mom Friendly" factor for Spam and virus filtering - its just so easy to use and Mom gets it in less than 30 seconds and that is so much better than what she was doing with spamassassin. Back at the dot bomb I worked for when the "I Love You" virus happened I created a little list called the Wall of Shame. As a email provider we didn't get the virus definitions updated for more than 12 hours and about 8% of the employees spread the virus and most embarrassing was that it was spread to many customers as well.

Digital signatures - If you looked at the mail header of Mr Helledy's email you can see the signature.

DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=simple; d=gra-inc.com;

It's probably not all that useful yet because it isn't widely implemented and I think its still a bit of a religious war which signature will become the standard. CCIL doesn't offer it yet, last I looked it is in the experimental source tree of the mail server exim4. I think the Premium/Educational offerings from Google will have it and LinuxForce probably would use postfix or something if a customer really wants it now. I think Google is a bit fickle on this one last I looked, the regular gmail accounts had digital sigs and the free hosted domains don't.

Network connectivity is something to consider - Mail is likely to be a lot more accessible at Google than where CCIL is now. I haven't setup monitoring of CCIL vs Google so I haven't got comparison charts. Back at the dot bomb I setup some monitoring which included CCIL and CCIL was usually more reliable then the services the company was selling - the business people didn't like it when a customer asked "what's that" when viisting the NOC one day. CCIL has not been accessible a number of times due to routing or other strange WCU firewall issues (ssh worked but smtp and http didn't) - sometimes all weekend. The only time I have had trouble getting to Gmail was when we experienced problems with our local cable or dialup providers.