Moving from basement to DH

Greetings,

DH figures prominently in my plans to ditch my expensive static-IP ADSL in favor of less-expensive, higher-bandwidth dynamic ADSL service.

However, I have questions about how to maintain my public-facing environment after the cut. So I am hoping for a little help from the experts...please?

My edge is an ISA 2004 firewall which I would like to continue to use after the cut, even if it's behind something like a LinkSys DDNS client.

Behind the firewall, the first of two IIS 6 servers hosts four HTML sites on different domains. Those sites can move to DH.

The other webserver provides SSL pass-through authentication to business data on my Windows file server. Those files have to stay in my office.

I also have an Exchange 2003 server. External users retrieve their mail via browsers, IMAP-S, and Outlook RPC over HTTPS sessions.

My business domain receives around a thousand messages each day, mostly spam, but the rest of the traffic is critical. To guard against outage, this domain has a secondary MX pointed at a store-and-forward server hosted elsewhere. Daily outbound traffic is typically less than 50 messages, and it's important that the outbound mail scores low on my recepient's spam filters. I've had a reverse pointer and an SPF record for years.

The rest of the domains don't receive much spam, and very little legitimate traffic. However, one of the domains sends out a band mailing list to 1,000 subscribers almost every week and that needs to appear legitmate to avoid blockage.

The questions I have are, how closely can I mimic my current environment once I cut over to dynamic IP service, and what services does DH offer that are of use in this quest?

Thank you very much!

Best regards,

Tim ==

You can move your web sites to a DH account, as you say, but if you want to offer Exchange services you'll need to keep running those yourself. You can do secure IMAP and webmail on your DH account as well, but if you need proprietary Exchange stuff ("Outlook RPC"?) you'll need to keep your Exchange server running. Of course, if you plan to continue offering file server access from home you'll need to maintain two sets of user accounts, one here and one there.

You're probably better off using a third-party service for your mailing list. The DH-provided announcement list is a bit limited functionally and outbound mail from the web servers is limited to 200 per hour. I'd recommend Campaign Monitor.

Outlook RPC over HTTPS could also be called MAPI over SSL. You can use the full Outlook client outside of your perimiter. I understand that I would have to keep my Exchange server running for this :>

For outbound mail, I could use the web server as an SMTP smart host for my day-to-day business mail. That would cut down on blocked messages by AOL, Yahoo! and others that don't like servers in dynamic IP blocks. Would DH set up a PTR for my smart host?

I could use the announcement list - the 200-per-hour thing isn't so bad. Does it queue on its own? Can I import my existing address list?

In reply to:
I could use the announcement list - the 200-per-hour thing isn't so bad.

Just to clarify; I don't believe the default DreamHost supplied announcement lists are subject to the 200 per hour limit. I believe the limit is only for 3rd party applications or scripts.

In reply to:
Can I import my existing address list?

Yes.

More information on the announcement lists can be found in the following wiki article;

http://www.wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/KB_/_Web_Programming_/_CGI,_PHP_&_Databases_/_Announcement_Mailing_List

Mark

i've been using PHPList (www.phplist.com)
i used to have around 3000 emails address, before I purged it.
now its only a couple 100.

its highly configurable, and can use cron to send the messages at specific times.
u can see it here (http://mailinglist.BUGabundo.net)

In reply to:
Just to clarify; I don't believe the default DreamHost supplied announcement lists are subject to the 200 per hour limit. I believe the limit is only for 3rd party applications or scripts.

Yes, that's what I meant, that the limit applies to mail sent yourself from an application running on the web server, as opposed to the DH announcement list. Sorry about that.

In reply to:
Outlook RPC over HTTPS could also be called MAPI over SSL. You can use the full Outlook client outside of your perimiter. I understand that I would have to keep my Exchange server running for this

So you're talking about keeping all mail in-house then? You can edit your MX records with DH so that mail is still delivered to your server rather than to theirs. But while it's certainly possible, I would strongly advise against running a mail server on a consumer-level DSL line with a dynamic IP address. If this particular Outlook/Exchange functionality is that important, you may be better off finding a hosted Exchange service. If not, you can just have your users use standard IMAP with the DH mail service.

PTR records are in DNS (sometimes called "reverse DNS") and, unless I'm misunderstanding your question, don't apply here. You are free to smarthost mail from your server through DH's outbound SMTP server providing you use SMTP AUTH. Nothing special has to be done on DH for this to work.