We have been using Hostking to host 18 different domains but one domain in particular has major issues with emails.
We have a website pointing to a 3rd party service provider server and we manage our own email account.
We have 50 email accounts and have been having major issues since Hostking moved from Cpanel to DirectAdmin with much more spam hitting our mailboxes.
They can’t find a solution to very important mails from several clients showing they have been delivered to the server but they just disappear without hitting the actual mailbox. We live tested imap account setup and you see it delivered on server but not appearing in webmail box to track delivery or even the outlook mailbox.
We have investigated many options, adjustments to spamassasin and currently I have disabled it completely and still the issues persist.
They can’t find solution! Coincidentally they had a complete server outage some 3-4 weeks ago for several hours and we have had issues since.
We have several large mailboxes (mine being 24gb) and have to keep these emails for legal compliance.
I want to move our hosting to Host Africa, even considering VPS but not really needed. Biggest issue was disc space as we currently using 75gb space and I liked the unlimited option we had.
Any suggestions guys? We really need to move urgently as the past 3 weeks is impacting our business severely with emails just getting lost.
I think we don’t need a complex solution and not even sure if VPS is really needed. Just need to block pestly spam and get all our emails.
Hi Andre, without knowing any in depth information on what's happening on the server one can only guess,
a few possibilities come to mind.
When email heading for your domain reaches their DirectAdmin server, are they applying any filters ?
When they had the outage, did they need to rebuild the mail structure, and if so, did they repair the permissions of the structure ?
Do they see the mails going into the destination user's folder into cur but its just not showing on webmail or the email client, or there are no new mails showing in 'cur' at all ?
Very difficult to estimate what the problem may be, it might even be something as silly as a misconfigured filter.
From a DirectAdmin perspective, we are aware that some of our customers who have many sub folders in their inboxes seem to have broken indexing, for example if you had
[inbox]
+[tax]
++[processed]
+++[2021]
++++[company name]
+++++[etc]
We have only had two users on DirectAdmin who had blank webmail with deep folder structures like that.
The fix for users who had deep imbedded sub folders in the mail structure was to import to Cpanel and restore back to DirectAdmin, as it seems Cpanel repairs the index and then DirectAdmin has the mails show in the inbox on webmail again. But it kept breaking on DirectAdmin and those users opted to permanently move back to Cpanel without any problems since. We did log a request to DirectAdmin about that and they referred us to a permissions checking script which didn't fix anything which also didn't explain why it occurred to begin with.
Getting back to your question about where to move to, a few considerations, you might want to migrate to office365, the email volume you are currently using would certainly benefit from that.
If you prefer to go the VPS route, domains.co.za really is the leader for local vps hosting.
For spam protection I must add my vote to what OCP mentioned, Mimecast really is amazing value for money depending on your budget. Its pricey but their targeted threat protection is excellent.
If you are looking for the cheapest option with the least amount of effort you could also consider remaining with a shared hosting vendor and perhaps using the Gmail to pop your inbox content so you then only pay for a small hosting package, large enough for your website and some space to keep mails until Gmail pulls the latest mails. Then you have your mail on any device that supports the Gmail app, plus you dont need to worry about broken PST files (up to a point, depending entirely if you actually prefer to keep mail on Outlook which would be a different matter).
Gmail can be set to send mail from your domain using the SMTP relay of your shared hosting vendor, that should save you some money in the long run.
Depends entirely on your budget, staff and software requirements of which option would suit you best.
i.e. if you have multiple users using the same mailbox I would say go the 365 route.
If you have very few users and each access their own mailbox and you want to save money, the Gmail route to host with a shared hosting provider rand using pop3 to pull mail to constantly keep your inbox on the server empty would work as you can get away with a very small hosting package like that.
If you have the money and your staff need enterprise level email and conferencing and software, I vote for office 365 and routing inbound and outbound mail through Mimecast.
What we use is DuoCircle for inbound and outbound spam filtering on our own billing software. All our hosting servers have inbound spam filtering with MagicSpam and SpamAssasin with outbound mail going through Mailchannels to keep our shared hosting IPs clean. Since moving to mailchannels we havent had a single shared IP be blacklisted for spam being sent by a malicious user.
Our customers can fine-tune how they want to receive mails on our shared hosting platforms,
if you get too much spam you may want to use boxtrapper which lets people who mail you receive an email requesting them to whitelist themselves as human before their mail will deliver to you.
You can also blacklist / whitelist recipients on Magicspam. All our users have SPF enabled by default which is industry standard by now.
The amount of money you wish to spend on your solution and how much administrative effort you wish to go into will greatly effect the outcome of which route you take.
I would even go as far as recommending sendmarc.com for dmark/spf/dkim record management as you get built-in reporting to see where people were trying to spoof mail for your domain.
Having a layered security approach would cost more in terms of fees and administrative effort but they add great value to your security. The more layers you add to the solution you may end up needing a managed service provider, perhaps one who also has a SIEM that reads events from the 365 logs, which is going to add more to the bill, but also add more layers to your security. And always enable two factor authentication as far as possible.
Lastly, while we are talking about security, we recommend using software like dashlane.com for keeping unique passwords for unique sites, they will also let you know if you have an account at a site where credentials were breached or leaked on the dark web. Dashlane is worth every penny.
Hope it helps, sorry for the long post.
