Hosting reccomendation

I know, I’ve downloaded gmail in the past. Way past. (I feel like I should do it for a client whose mailbox is unmanageable at this point)

But I’ve always considered gmail to be first and foremost a webmail, probably because that’s how I started with it with an early account.

While being able to access an account via the web is important to me, it’s nowhere near as important as being able to download to my computer, that’s all.

I guess what I wanted to say, and didn’t do well, is that I don’t want a web-based service that combines email, calendars and whatever else they put in there.

I just want to get email to my computer somehow.

Anyway! I found Scala in a couple of articles and have added them to my list.

Diane

Fastmail has imap so you don’t need to use their webmail, though their web interface is quite good. You can ignore the calendar completely, though you’ll want to put frequently used email addresses in contacts. But there’s no need to sync them anywhere. They use standard caldav and carddav though, so there’s no lock-in. They’re quite active in the open source community and not only follow standards, but contribute to improving the standards.

Another very useful feature is that they can fetch mail from other mail services via pop, so you can have them collect e.g. gmail mail and have it all in one place. There’s good filtering using Sieve too. I do prefer to reduce their spam filtering and have Spam Assassin in Apple Mail take care of the harder decisions. The combination is close to perfect.

Fastmail is an independent company based in Australia and they’ve been around for many years. There was a brief excursion a longish while back when Opera (Norwegian browser company) bought them and contrived to not actually mangle things, but when Facebook made noises about buying Opera the original Fastmail developers managed to buy the email service back partly to keep it away from Facebook, to resounding cheers from the users. [Oddly, that seems to have stopped Facebook from wanting to buy Opera at all, gee I wonder why? Surely FB didn’t intend to snoop in people’s mail?!]

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Perhaps someone else has had a different experience, but I’ve never personally nor heard from anybody that wasn’t able to access their email account via Apple Mail or for that matter any computer based email reader. So I don’t believe it should play any factor in your decision.

I guess I should add that there have been intermittent issues over the years where either Apple Mail or an email provider changed something that broke the ability to download email, but those issues are normally quickly resolved.

There are advantages to IMAP accounts vs the mostly legacy POP accounts from the aspect of access from multiple computers/devices and backups.

With Fastmail, you can consolidate the email from multiple domains into one account. If you’d prefer having multiple mailboxes, though, Fastmail gets expensive pretty quickly. One persistent criticism of Fastmail over the years is poor customer service.

Some other options are Runbox, Polarismail, Zoho, Mxroute, Protonmail, Rollernet, Purelymail, and Tutanota. These are the hosts I gleaned from a quick check of a few threads on emaildiscussions.com.

I’m not sure what package was used, Outlook, Exchange… but the lady who setup the email service at one of my clients used one of those and it took multiple phone calls for me to get it setup in Apple Mail. It was way harder than it should have been. It’s a websuite of some sort. I could have installed Outlook, but I wasn’t going to do that either. So I’m highly motivated to avoid all that again!

Diane

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Each of my domains has a few different addresses and it sounds like
each one will need a plan? Though maybe I misread that one.

Fastmail again…

One plan (the $50/year level) will let you use up to 100 domains with an unlimited number of email address per domain. These are aliases and are sent into your main account address. Each alias is a single line in a settings file, so not something that uses real resources compared to actually sending/receiving a message. If you want to use aliases on the fastmail owned domains (useful for a number of things) there’s a limit but it’s something like 600, so not an issue for most people.

If you want separate logins to addresses for different users, then you need more accounts. For more than three people/accounts, it’s probably somewhat cheaper to get the professional level ($90/year) which lets you assign an address on one of your domains to the cheaper $30/year account. I’ve been considering this so I can stop running my own email server, which is supporting a few friends who for some reason or other don’t want their addresses to vanish.

Fastmail’s basic account doesn’t include IMAP/POP3/SMTP anymore, so if you want to avoid webmail, it’s a non-starter.

Fastmail’s basic account doesn’t include IMAP/POP3/SMTP anymore, so if
you want to avoid webmail, it’s a non-starter.

Well that’s a bummer, I wonder when they removed local client access (I don’t think they ever had pop for the cheaper plans, it’s fragile and a pita to maintain). They do have a way to export to .zip files, but it looks clumsy–one mailbox at a time.

Fastmail charges for its services, and privacy is a big reason why people subscribe to it. A substantial % of Fastmail subscribers would probably drop the service rather than pay to be tracked.

But I doubt that Facebook would have seriously considered buying Fastmail, which has less than 1% global market share for business email providers:

https://www.slintel.com/tech/hosted-email/fastmail-market-share

I couldn’t quickly find any consumer market share numbers for Fastmail, so they are probably too small to have been included in studies. Facebook used to own an email service, and it was a tremendous flop. If it wants to make another try, it will have no problem buying one or building their own.

Good to know, and thanks for that email discussion link!

Diane

… as is correct. HTTP connections are not encrypted, so anybody monitoring packets on the route between yourself and the server can see everything.

If your site doesn’t do anything sensitive (like hosting a store front), then it may not matter much. But keep in mind that even a non-sensitive site may process sensitive data (e.g. user logins), which should be kept secure.

SSL certificates come in many varieties.

A minimal certificate (like those provided by Let’s Encrypt) allows encrypted connections, but doesn’t do much more. A user viewing the certificate will see the domain (useful when your web browser and/or URL doesn’t make it clear), and the browser will ensure that the server’s domain matches it, but you get no additional security:

Screen Shot 2021-09-20 at 10.21.24

The domain validation can detect man-in-the-middle attacks (e.g. a proxy server that decrypts the contents, changes something, and attempts to re-encrypt the changed data), since the man in the middle won’t have the private key part of the certificate (which only the web server should have).

More elaborate certificates (which require you to send ID verification documentation to a certificate authority) will let users validate that you (or your organization) are actually running the site. When a user views its content, it will contain all of the contact/ID information you provided as a part of getting the certificate, in addition to its DNS domain:

Screen Shot 2021-09-20 at 10.20.53

These kinds of certificates are not free (can be quite expensive, depending on who issues them and how much background checking they do to validate the data you provide), but they should be used if your site processes sensitive data (e.g. banking or payment processing).

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No, but I could if I wanted to. There are scripts that make that easy. I use Fastmail.

Any reason to choose Vultr other than they have an even-lower-end option that’s less than $5/month?

I just heard good things about Vultr and I’ve had a good experience. I host my website and various services there for $5 a month.

Anyone not using shared hosting can have free SSL/TLS certificates from Let’s Encrypt, but that’s part of what you had to set up yourself on the command line, right? I expect any shared host to automate Let’s Encrypt certificates for their customers to make HTTPS simply a checkbox option in their web interface, Dreamhost does and my impression Pair does.

Yeah, I set it up on the command line. It’s pretty easy if you’re comfortable with the terminal.

Another recommendation for pair.com from someone using it for over 20 years. Hard to believe it has been that long. I haven’t had to use tech support for awhile, but whenever I did they took care of the issues.

Sep 27, 2021
Thanks to all for your Rx’s- with this Tidbits Talk- I really appreciate it.
I have gone with Pair.com. Their tech support was superb. I haven’t done any of this web domain stuff in about 12 or so years, I was behind the curve. They helped me thru it with 3 or 4 phone calls.

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When I read pair.com, I remember the MacResource Page. I think pair.com used to advertise there.

I have been using MacHighway for the better part of 15 years. It has had its ups and downs. Their support services, at one time, were great. They used to call ME sometimes and they always picked up the phone. Last year was a rocky one…not happy with their support, but they seemed to have picked it up this year. After reading through this thread, I am going to talk to PAIR…

Rich

Oct 11, 2021
Richard,
Pair was great. They held my hand throughout the 3 phone calls I needed them as I had not done this network garbage in over 11 years. I was with Machighway since 2009-
In that time twice they change servers and did not tell it’s customers. Their knowledgebase is way out of date with old settings. Yes, years ago they had great service. But they went down hill serverely -they blame it on the pandemic - But their online chat is non-exsistent- which is what they want you to use. None of my emails worked with any of the settings they had me do. Very frustrating. Even cancelling the account was a problem. That took 3 emails before they finally said I needed to cancel on my end not their end. And I asked specific questions. I am happy to lose them.

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Paul:

I have already sent an e-mail request to start a dialog with PAIR. My MCH contract ends in December, so this would be the perfect time to jump ship. I find myself getting more and more frustrated with MCH when, frankly, it is a service that I want to “just work.”
They have been server migrating since Saturday, so the sites I maintain are still down. Any updates? Answers to “tickets” or phone calls. Any update on your status page. Nope…nothing. I have no idea when my sites will come back. I don’t run any business, these are all hobby sites, though I do want to set up a little e-commerce site for my wife next year.
So their smallest plans saves me money AND looks like it will do the job for now. Hopefully with less aggravation.
The only question I have at the moment is: Can I connect using the Mac application iWEB? My wife still uses this dinosaur, and will continue until I rebuild her site.

Thanks Paolo…

Rich

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I’d recommend Pair Networks; I’m sure they’ve been mentioned already.

2:33 PM PDT
Does MacHighway register your domains or just hosts them?
Mine are registered with Network Solutions and MacHighway just did the hosting -so I had a fairly easy turnover. If you have yours registered with them then you’ll have to contact Pair and get instructions for the code that you receive from MacHighway for the change of registration. It is all on the first page of their site-but a phone call might help ease the burden. Isn’t the iWeb obsolete now. I thought that was for building sites-but I could be wrong on that one.
Cheers----