Domain email hosting

ViperGTI

ViperGTI

New member
I'm looking around for an email hosting provider. Who of you have your own domains with email being hosted by a 3rd party?

Obviously Hetzner has a web-hosting option which includes email accounts (well, so do all hosting providers) and I see Afrihost and WebAfrica both have email-only hosting options. Does anyone have experience or recommendations?
Basically, here is our requirements:
- Up to about 20 mailboxes
- Easy to use Webmail & Autoresponder should be configurable via webmail interface by the mailbox user self
- Fast servers and 0 Downtime
- Virus and Spam filtering

Screen prints of the webmail UIs welcome :)

Then, and this is optional, the ability to sync the calendars and share it with other users. However, if I don't get a solution for this, I might just install the free edition of SmarterMail on our server and use that.
 
Thanks, but I prefer to host the emails locally.

I've decided to give WebAfrica a try despite the complaints on MyBB... Matt seems to be happy with them and they do seem to offer very good value for money. 5Gb space with unlimited emails, domains and databases for R80. Best of all, they use SmarterMail for the email server software which means that Contact and Calendar sharing between users via Outlook is possible.

As for the unused disk space (since we have dedicated servers), I'll simply point a sub-domain to that server and use it as a playground for Joomla, Moodle and whatever other opensource tools I come across.
 
How is the webafrica email btw? My company pays R35 a mailbox to mweb for our email.
 
First the negative: It is not the fastest. Emails take a couple of minutes to be delivered to other mailboxes sent from WA whereas email sent from Vodamail or Hetzner takes 2 seconds to reflect in the other mailbox. I'll be able to say more on this after about a week of using this.

Now the positives.
Price
We're paying R80 a month for unlimited mailboxes / 5Gb disk space. You can also have unlimited domains and domain aliases.

Interface
All new accounts at WA uses the SmarterMail 9.3 mail server. The webmail interface is very easy to use for users with a wide range of customisations available to the mailbox users self like setting up your auto-responder, etc.

Sharing & Syncing
Similar to how sharepoint does it, Smartertools have the ability to sync your calendar, contacts and tasks with Outlook as well as share it with other users in your domain. As far as I can tell, WA self doesn't even know about this, but since our previous provider used SmarterMail 11.2, I knew the features were there.

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My alternative was to get a Hetzner account for sending / receiving emails (their servers are super-fast) and load the free version of SmarterMail on one of our dedicated servers for the calendar sharing. The free version only supports 10 mailboxes and while we have more than 10 mailboxes, only about 5 people use the calendar sharing feature.
 
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Seems I've hit my first snag with WebAfrica.
Can't send out any emails. All emails are returned with a message "Access to this mail system has been rejected due to sending MTA's bad reputation".
WebAfrica's support is nowhere to be found.
 
ViperGTI said:
Seems I've hit my first snag with WebAfrica.
Can't send out any emails. All emails are returned with a message "Access to this mail system has been rejected due to sending MTA's bad reputation".
WebAfrica's support is nowhere to be found.
Click to expand...

Wow that's bad. :( Sometimes the quickest way to get support with WebAfrica is to contact their reps at MyBroadband or to contact one of them on Twitter.
 
Solitude said:
Wow that's bad. :( Sometimes the quickest way to get support with WebAfrica is to contact their reps at MyBroadband or to contact one of them on Twitter.
Click to expand...

Thanks, will try that.
For now I've just changed my outgoing mail server to our Hetzner account that we use for sending out notification emails from our applications (until this is resolved). Only problem is that since the email account's address don't match my email address, it sometimes goes to the junkmail folder at the recipients. Hopefully they'll sort this out soon though.
 
Hey Viper,

I have about 180 domains with Hetzner and around 25 with Hostgator. We moved from Webafrica years ago. I love the look and feel of the KonsoleH web gui they have and the service desk people know me by name so service is never an issue.

I highly recommend going with them.
 
Roomys said:
Hey Viper,

I have about 180 domains with Hetzner and around 25 with Hostgator. We moved from Webafrica years ago. I love the look and feel of the KonsoleH web gui they have and the service desk people know me by name so service is never an issue.

I highly recommend going with them.
Click to expand...

Hetzner is the best when it comes to hosting... but their email hosting does not meet our requirements. Their setup is pretty basic. We do have an email account with them though that we use for sending out email notifications from our applications (no-reply@app_domain). Their email sending and receiving is instant. Our dedicated servers are also with them (there's no-one better).

However, things like Domain Aliases are not supported. WebAfrica also uses the SmarterMail software which allows you to sync your calendar and contacts with Outlook as well as share them with other people in the company. This is very useful. The UI is also very nice to use for when users must set up their own Autoresponders and so on... Ironically, our users are not the brightest.

I think in 3 months this was the first / second issue we've had... This one was due to a spammer using the same mail server. It is a bit concerning that we can't get hold of their support in an emergency, but the service seems to be stable most of the time which wasn't the case with our previous provider. Contacting WA via MyBB helped speed up the process though.
 
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