Is it worth doing email hosting?

chromico

Hi everyone, I was looking into offering email hosting for my clients on my enhance cluster. I want to know what I might be getting myself into, how much time does it take to maintain and what's your experience with it overall? Currently, I am just selling Titan Email Inboxes and for SMTP sending Sendgrid or Zepto.

twest

Our competitors have been sunsetting email services for at least 5 years, and I don't blame them.

Beyond the troubles of constantly having to upkeep settings, monitor abuse, and deal with getting your IPs off RBLs, AND the stress of seeing other small companies getting shut down by their providers for "ip abuse", there's even more horribleness to deal with. Primarily, the support. Customers will constantly need their hand held to setup their boxes on their phones or laptops, and they won't have any idea how their apps work - but you have to know how they work. And then the oddball "I sent an email to someone's moonmailcow account and it got blocked", and then they need help adding dkim/spf/dmarc, and then they need help setting up a new domain, and then they need help adding a new mailbox, and then they lost their password... It. Never. Ends.

When our competitors started ending email service entirely, we took a middle of the road approach. We still offer "free limited email". The limits are = no support, strict emails per hour/day to prevent abuse, strict storage limits. All these are easy to implement on our dedicated cPanel email server (it's on the c panel email role, so all it can do is email).

When a customer inquired about free email they're recommended to use Cloudflare forwarding (since 99% of them just use Gmail anyways and don't really need a full custom domain email), or if they need support and more features/better limits then they should go to Google Workspaces for professional email.

This works good for us. Maybe 5% of customers use our free email option, 20% use Cloudflare forwarding, the rest use Google or other professional email service.

Sometimes we get a request for support for our no-support email, it's $100/hr.

Email is such a horrid time sink. Not worth it.

8Dweb

twest @twest
I am with Twest on this one. We do the same thing. It is offered, but we make it clear that we no longer manage nor guarantee email services for all the same reasons.

We have about 15-20% that use our email services, the rest utilize the paid providers.

IF you can find a niche with email services, I seriously doubt Enhance is or will be in any near future timeline the product you would want to utilize. For that, go after SmarterMail, Icewarp or if you hate yourself, run Exchange for your clients.

JohnB

twest adding a new mailbox, and then they lost their password... It. Never. Ends.

Had a client lose 5 years of business emails on Zoho because they used POP and outlook corrupted itself. They figured that because its "in the cloud" everything was backed up.

I don't envy the poor bastards working support for any email provider...

chromico

Hi Twest,

Thank you soo much for your valuable feedback. I had done some research before on maintaining an email server but I just wanted to know whether it was really that hard. Turns out it's a lot worse :/ Most people even on Reddit bring up some of the IP abuse issues but I didn't consider the support thing which kinda sucks.

How reliable is Cloudflare Email Forwarding? I know it's from Cloudflare but I have some doubts. Also, what do you think of Titan Email? I offer it mainly due to its really cheap inbox price and it has a mobile app ( good for dumb clients ).

twest

chromico we've been using the Cloudflare email forwarding since it was first offered and have had zero issues with it. It's surprisingly well featured, like you can do catch-all forwarding, and it's stupid simple to setup. For a totally free solution, it's perfect.

I've never used Titan, but if it's in your budget and works then sure why not. I think running a 3rd party service for email is a great strat, no need to get your hands dirty, give you more time to focus on your hosting products.

CloudyBlake

I stopped hosting email on webservers over 15yrs ago and moved to reselling Rackspace. We bundled with the webhosting, and focused on better service and support. We gave them the whole 25gb for mailbox storage at no extra charge. RS has a good reseller program and it was a profitable segment for us.

twest

JohnB lmao, amazing. I had a ticket last week that was similar, the user deleted all their emails, all of them... Luckily, they were on Google Workspaces, so referred them to GW support. Google was able to restore their emails in like 5 minutes lol 👍

cosmoshosting

Supporting email is a huge burden and a huge support overhead.
Everything from 'Walk me through setting up my emails on my xxx', 'why is my crappy newsletter being marked as spam', 'what do you mean I have to put a recaptcha on and secure my contact form?'.

If planning to do it via enhance, at-least wait until we start getting some proper monitoring tools and advanced anti-spam (incoming/outgoing) functionality. At the moment the built in tools are externally limited and far better platforms exist.

JohnB Had a client lose 5 years of business emails on Zoho because they used POP and outlook corrupted itself.

Yea that's common. A good trick is someone who always uses IMAP, connecting it up on POP on a particular device and it deleting 10 years worth of emails off the server. Good backups are a requirement.

8Dweb

JohnB Been there. When we offered SmarterMail for years, we forced all users to utilize ONLY IMAP for this very reason. The sad thing is that with the paid Email server offerings, it became a losing value proposition, as they became increasingly expensive due to per user/yearly fees.

CloudyBlake

JohnB We wouldn't let customers use POP. Sometimes it took a firm assertive hand to migrate them and get them over the hump. It's for the best and long term reduced support.

JohnB

twest In my case their email file was corrupted somehow (its outlook so not surprising). I was able to uncorrupt it. 35 gb takes a while but I bill by the hour. They now take weekly backups and use IMAP lol. Originally those "backups" were a copy on the same drive on the same computer...

Some people aren't built to have anything important on their computer. But the sad thing is those people won't know how to pick good cloud providers that will keep their data safe. They will pick a CyberPanel hoster and think its good lol.

Steamon

For me I always wanted to know how everything worked and specifically did webhosting and e-mail due I feel I could do better and some bigger webhostings making mistakes with records or clients doing their mailing or records wrong and I was called as icter to fix it at other companies. Currently, I have 3 setups. Imap on mailcow / sogo activesync on mailcow / microsoft 365.

Then around 2018 for me, the inbox issues happend with microsoft 365 / outlook / gmail? Solution was training ip's we did not had enough traffic to train IPs. 2nd solution? was Spamexperts for me. This ensures the mail land in the inbox for the client they are sending to.

Sometimes some whitelist requests but like complaints or issues never had it but I never had that many clients at the beginning. Overall if you lay you bread and cutter management wise know how everything works and have a monitoring inbox not to much can go wrong and test crashes or situation on a test server.

Now with Enhance yeah for sure some features are missing compared to Mailcow but I hope one day to transfer over the groupware clients from it to Enhance so everything is on 1 system back-up wise. So I can put the mailcow vps offline.

I always will have a test cluster on enhance to test things myself before putting it on the live cluster.

But for me out of the box I think imap incoming and outgoing works fine with spamexperts on enhance and if you need more protection now you can add Cpfence.