Sigh… Training a new spam filter sucks. I was using SpamSoap with much success until yesterday. Lately more spam seemed to be slipping through. And with the recent problems I was having with our self-hosted mail server, I decided it was time to make a clean break and use an email service provider. I choose 1&1 because my dedicated server plan already includes 5000 mailboxes with a 2GB limit per mailbox. That’s, um, quite a bit for a 3 person consulting firm. (Heck, we can maintain multiple secondary mailboxes for backup.)
I had a few requirements and 1&1 does meet them:
- IMAP over SSL (technically it’s probably TLS)
- SMTP on nonstandard port (my ISP at home blocks port 25)
- authenticated SMTP over SSL (again, I suppose it’s really TLS)
- Webmail access
- Real spam and virus filtering (if 3rd party spam filtering is not supported)
I have quite a few complaints about 1&1 already (warning, some geeky details included):
- Their mail server won’t accept mail for your domain unless your MX records are pointing at their servers. Seems like a good idea but it means you cannot use a third party spam filtering service like SpamSoap. If the 1&1 spam filtering ain’t up to snuff, I’m going to have to start looking again.
- Their default spam filter setting is too aggressive. I had a tonne of false positives today. Somewhere near 50% of items in the Spam folder were legit.
- Their webmail interface sucks. Sucks, sucks, sucks. Worse than OWA (Outlook Web Access) in Firefox. I may try setting up RoundCube Webmail as an alternative web interface to my IMAP folders.
- The Delete and Spam buttons in the webmail interface are really close together. It is pretty easy to accidentally mark a message as spam which you had intended to delete. That will feed the adaptive spam filtering engine and increase the chance of future false positives.
- The first layer of tech support was useless and would not let me talk to tier 2 tech support. They put me on hold for extended periods of time to go talk to tier 2 tech support but would not let me talk to them directly. When I told the guy I was using telnet to enter SMTP commands manually, he put me on hold for half an hour.
- I submitted a tech support request via the admin console and the response I got back was basically a blow off.
- SMTP over SSL works with Outlook Express on port 25 but not their nonstandard port. Works in Outlook on both ports.
Life would be so much easier if email technology wasn’t so flawed. The guys at TrustMe are doing awesome stuff in this regard: http://www.keepemailsafe.com/ (full disclosure: I’m doing some contract work for them right now). If you want to try out TrustMe, you can add me to your buddy list (derek@ardentdev.com).
You should of asked us before going through the trouble, we ran the 1and1 WebMail for a while, and we quickly decided against it. Cant say enough horrible things about the Web Mail client (and another – IT SUCKS!).
Yeah, and when an expeditor is marked as spammer (accidentally), it seems there is no way to correct the filtering rules. Or did you find them?
Webmail 1and1 Customer Services is terrible.
Call them — each person will be reading from a script. Ask for a supervisor. He or she will read from a script as well. Try to reach someone in corporate. Try to find the corporate number — it takes some intense research. And when you finally reach corporate, the person you talk to will reroute you to the same IT Department that you spoke with in the first place.
Email them — and wait for a response. See if the response they give you actually addresses the problem you contacted them about in the first place. See if it looks like a canned response, or as if they have made any changes or taken any proactive steps to address the matter.
i too think so
lisa is right