mxroute.com - A new inexpensive email hosting

[jarland]

Originally Posted by FredOnline

MXroute policy revised. Two sections added to the bottom.

https://mxroute.com/tos.html

Had to add Hotmail to the no forwards list. Got an IP blocked from one single forwarder that really didn't even forward that much spam. They're getting militant over there me thinks.

[jarland]

In the interest of full disclosure to everyone here, since I have quite a few clients here.

MXroute had a bad week. This Wednesday we were down from about 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM CST, some clients unable to access it until around 4:00 PM. An incoming DDOS caused this. DDOS protection had been removed as it was not working well for providing consistent, clear service.

Yesterday I live migrated the MX1 server to OVH to benefit from new DDOS protection. In the process, I made a mistake and 3 clients were not migrated properly. Two were out for 4 hours, one until the next morning. This was a failure in my migration process. I relied on a flawed method for verifying that clients had been properly migrated. All three clients were compensated with what I hope was considered to be above what was necessary.

We've had a couple of rough times in our short history thus far, but to quote Nietzsche, "what does not kill me makes me stronger."

Better times ahead!

[emebrs]

It sounds like you really take this seriously and am interested in learning from whatever events may happen. It is interesting to read your account from the sysadmin point of view.

[ReuvenNY]

I have been an early user of MXRoute. I was lucky to have Jarland graciously let me use one of his domains to test the service before I registered my own domain. I found the service to be very reliable, fast (even faster than Fastmail, and I am in New York) and constantly attended and developed. It was for me a contender to become a top player in my email services lineup.
My only obstacle was the fact that Jarland requested not to forward my incoming emails to Gmail.com

Why was it a problem for me? Because all me emails are forwarded to my Gmail accounts, so I can check them while on the road, before dealing with them back in the office using IMAP. This setup worked for me very well for years, and has never create a problem for any of the many services I use.

I overcame this obstacle by adding my outlook.com account to my Gmail app on my phone and forwarding all my incoming mail to that account. That was my setup for over a year.

Today, as per the new Terms of Service, my forwarding to outlook.com was disabled which tendered my MXRoute account unusable.

That made me wonder: how could Gmail, Yahoo, Fastmail, Runbox, Tuffmail, PolarisMail, everyone.net and many, many others allow their users forward emails to other accounts without any issues? Aren’t they concerned with the same risks that Jarland is? I am not sure I have an answer, but I am wondering whether it’s wise for a new service to be so restrictive and overprotective. I would think that perhaps there are some other ways that others utilyze to protect their services from being blacklisted (or blocked).

Than again, I do not run an email business and I do not fully understand the idiosyncracies involved - I just use common sense.
It was a good year, but it’s over now... Unless something changes I’ll have to continue searching for another “MXRoute” with more reasonable rules...

[jarland]

Originally Posted by ReuvenNY

I have been an early user of MXRoute. I was lucky to have Jarland graciously let me use one of his domains to test the service before I registered my own domain. I found the service to be very reliable, fast (even faster than Fastmail, and I am in New York) and constantly attended and developed. It was for me a contender to become a top player in my email services lineup.
My only obstacle was the fact that Jarland requested not to forward my incoming emails to Gmail.com

Why was it a problem for me? Because all me emails are forwarded to my Gmail accounts, so I can check them while on the road, before dealing with them back in the office using IMAP. This setup worked for me very well for years, and has never create a problem for any of the many services I use.

I overcame this obstacle by adding my outlook.com account to my Gmail app on my phone and forwarding all my incoming mail to that account. That was my setup for over a year.

Today, as per the new Terms of Service, my forwarding to outlook.com was disabled which tendered my MXRoute account unusable.

That made me wonder: how could Gmail, Yahoo, Fastmail, Runbox, Tuffmail, PolarisMail, everyone.net and many, many others allow their users forward emails to other accounts without any issues? Aren’t they concerned with the same risks that Jarland is? I am not sure I have an answer, but I am wondering whether it’s wise for a new service to be so restrictive and overprotective. I would think that perhaps there are some other ways that others utilyze to protect their services from being blacklisted (or blocked).

Than again, I do not run an email business and I do not fully understand the idiosyncracies involved - I just use common sense.
It was a good year, but it’s over now... Unless something changes I’ll have to continue searching for another “MXRoute” with more reasonable rules...

You can use your MXroute account through Outlook.com (also Gmail and Yahoo) using the instructions provided in the link that I gave you. You don't need to forward e-mail to it.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/yahoo-imap
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/21289?hl=en
http://email.about.com/od/yahoomailt...Yahoo_Mail.htm


Plenty of services allow forwarders and plenty of them are in a constant state of dealing with support requests from clients who are dealing with bounced e-mails due to forwarders put in place by other users, blacklisted IP addresses, rate limiting, and other problems. You may be lucky enough to have not been a victim of someone else's choice to risk IP reputation for mild convenience, but plenty have and that number has increased in the last year or so.

MXroute focuses on high quality and low cost. That means that we do not allow our users to increase our overhead and decrease our quality for a mild convenience that can be just as easily obtained in other ways, as noted by the link above.

You can call it being over protective, but I call it a commitment to a quality delivery reputation and a low overhead by removing things that unnecessarily increase support costs.

By more "reasonable" rules you mean a company that will let you roll the dice with their IP reputation and the deliverability of their other client's e-mail. You will not receive that from me, sorry. The policy for Hotmail came as a direct result of one client causing an IP to be blocked for 48 hours by having one single forwarder. An IP with an excellent reputation prior to that. You tell me what you would tell other clients who had their mail denied by Hotmail for several hours that day (until the IP auto rotated), so that one client could have a convenience that he could obtain in another way.

I'm so sick of people complaining about problems that they do not understand because they don't have to deal with it every day, as though I'm lying to them about it. I know what happens. I see it with my two eyes. I'm not making it up. Adapt to the new realities of the internet and use the tools that have been provided for you to do so, the ones I clearly pointed you to. Want to complain? Complain to Microsoft for their new heavy handed anti-spam policies.

There, I finally got that off my chest

That wasn't 100% directed at you, about 50%. Honestly sometimes I think it's a lose-lose situation. I either deal with constant support requests about poor delivery reputation, mail landing in spam boxes, mail delayed for several hours or even blocked due to temporary IP rate limiting..... or I deal with constant complaints about me trying to save everyone from those things. You just can't please people. It matters not, I press on. MXroute isn't going anywhere, nor is MXroute apologizing for the anti-spam policies of Microsoft, Yahoo, Gmail, and AOL.

The bottom line is that when you run a service, sometimes you have to choose who to upset. Sometimes you simply have to make choices. Now, for me the choice was easy. I can upset people who can't take the time to read those links I gave them, the links that explain exactly how they can have their convenience without hurting the second group, or upset that second group who simply wants their email to land in inboxes consistently. It's no contest.

[FredOnline]

If you have an MXroute account and your own domain, have you considered setting up another e-mail account/address on your domain purely for your 'phone, and forwarding to that address instead?

My cellphone has it's own e-mail address and (mostly) everything I receive gets forwarded there.

The bonus there is that if I lose my cellphone or it's stolen, that particular e-mail account is independent and so cannot compromise my main e-mail account.

[George_B]

The reason why we don't get blocked with Hotmail, and others, is because we are part of each big provider's spam prevention loop. With Hotmail it's SNDS, AOL has a feedback loop, etc. This allows us to work with them in case of abuse so we can prevent them as they happen.

Jarland: sign up for SNDS: https://postmaster.live.com/snds/

[jarland]

Originally Posted by George_B

The reason why we don't get blocked with Hotmail, and others, is because we are part of each big provider's spam prevention loop. With Hotmail it's SNDS, AOL has a feedback loop, etc. This allows us to work with them in case of abuse so we can prevent them as they happen.

Jarland: sign up for SNDS: https://postmaster.live.com/snds/

Thanks. When they complain about a forwarder sending too much spam do you just notify your client to disable the forwarder or do they just not care about it if you're on their list?

Granted we don't own our IPs and I'm not sure OVH would help (they require approval from IP owner). The constant DDOS limits our datacenter choices, and ARIN would increase overhead a bit.

[George_B]

Originally Posted by jarland

Thanks. When they complain about a forwarder sending too much spam do you just notify your client to disable the forwarder or do they just not care about it if you're on their list?

Granted we don't own our IPs and I'm not sure OVH would help (they require approval from IP owner). The constant DDOS limits our datacenter choices, and ARIN would increase overhead a bit.

Reducing Spam should be a community effort where everyone does their share. It's not ok for you to do unconditional forwarding of Spam messages to another provider. You need an active spam filter that traps the messages and instead you send over a Spam Quarantine message to the forwarded address letting them know which messages you didn't deliver because you thought they were Spam.

Edit: yes, you need your own IP space in order to use SNDS

[jarland]

I appreciate the input George

For anyone interested, MXroute does not own IP space, nor would colocation behind DDOS filtering and ARIN fees be compatible with the MXroute business plan. That does not mean it is a bad plan, just a different one. I said from day one I wanted to shake up the industry. Forwarders to these providers must be a sacrifice made for being a customer of MXroute. There are healthy alternatives that function just fine, and the benefit is the reduced cost for the delivery quality provided. That is the focus of MXroute.

For those that refuse all alternatives to forwarders, it sounds like our friends at Polaris know how to handle their business and would be happy to have you

[ReuvenNY]

Originally Posted by jarland

...

The bottom line is that when you run a service, sometimes you have to choose who to upset. Sometimes you simply have to make choices. Now, for me the choice was easy. I can upset people who can't take the time to read those links I gave them, the links that explain exactly how they can have their convenience without hurting the second group, or upset that second group who simply wants their email to land in inboxes consistently. It's no contest.

I guess you are indirectly referring to me: first, I am not upset, I totally understand that you have your system setup in a way that fits your business model. I was just expressing how it does or does not fit my way of using it.

Second, for me it wasn't a question of taking the time to read those links you gave - I use catch all address, which is a very important feature for me as I give out different email addresses to different correspondents. Forwarding from Outlook or Gmail would effectively render the catch-all useless.

Third, when you run a business it's best not to upset anyone.

[jarland]

A business without an upset client or former client is generally a business that either deals in few large contracts or has no customers. In the hosting industry there is unfortunately no way to run a business without upsetting people.

Catch all is fine. We have that feature. Catch all to account on domain, use instructions in link to set up on outlook.com. The options are all there, I just can't seem to get past this brick wall that people have in their minds that forwarding mail is the only way to achieve their result. It upsets me, I'm not going to lie about that.

[ReuvenNY]

Originally Posted by jarland

A business without an upset client or former client is generally a business that either deals in few large contracts or has no customers. In the hosting industry there is unfortunately no way to run a business without upsetting people.

Catch all is fine. We have that feature. Catch all to account on domain, use instructions in link to set up on outlook.com. The options are all there, I just can't seem to get past this brick wall that people have in their minds that forwarding mail is the only way to achieve their result. It upsets me, I'm not going to lie about that.

Jarland, please do not get upset, I hope I am not doing that to you... We are all in the same world of good people, trying to do business and use products, struggling with the bad guys who are trying to harms us. Discussing issues is not bad, your health is more important.

[jarland]

Don't worry it's not just one person

It's just very frustrating to deal with. You're just the first person to say so many words about it outside of an email, so I vented a bit here. I'm not ashamed of it. You guys get a fully transparent view into the realities of running an email service. I'm not afraid to air my frustrations. What I've got to do is find a way to get through to people that options exist and that forwarders are not the only way.

[ReuvenNY]

Originally Posted by jarland

Don't worry it's not just one person

It's just very frustrating to deal with. You're just the first person to say so many words about it outside of an email, so I vented a bit here. I'm not ashamed of it. You guys get a fully transparent view into the realities of running an email service. I'm not afraid to air my frustrations. What I've got to do is find a way to get through to people that options exist and that forwarders are not the only way.

If I or any other member can help, please let us know. I know I am speaking for all the members on this thread by saying that we want you to succeed and do well. We may have a different way of at looking at things, but the same goal.