OT: Recommendation for industrial strength email hosting provider?

[John Rumm]

I am getting fed up with 123-reg's dismal server performance. Its now getting to be a pain for customers with large IMAP folders - there comes a point where they basically become inaccessible for most of the day[1] since their servers just time out when trying to access them much of the time.

Anyone care to recommend an outfit that can do decent IMAP performance, handle email boxes of a few gig each, and more importantly, offer a bulk imap sync capability?

[1] Obviously getting them to cull some of the crap in their mailboxes would help - but quite often by the time they work out there is a problem its too late for even that!

[Tim Watts]

I run my own (exim plus dovecot) on a Linode server running debian.

I can at least vouch for Linode - but i presume you do not want to roll your own or maintain it for lots of your customers?

[Peter Crosland]

You need to pay more if you want really good service.

[Jeremy Nicoll - news posts]

Maybe fastmail?

I don't know what they're like for IMAP at all, but they take mail seriously.

[dennis]

I doubt if anyone can get good IMAP performance with mailboxes that big. Are they just big files or a huge number of messages?

[Scion]

John Rumm put finger to keyboard:

Have a look at Rackspace.

[Adrian]

I don't think the problem is 123. I think the real problem is the way you're (ab)using IMAP.

Are the users working totally online, or do they have local copies of their folders? If not that, try it (pilot with one or two!). You'll find that they spend most of their time working locally, so there's a metric fuckload less downloading and waiting - and that's what your problem is, because they're asking for a copy of the message each time.

Used appropriately, damn near ANY provider will be "industrial strength".

[Tim Watts]

You can get decent performance with mbox's that large with dovecot as it does generate its own indexes and it has a lazy delete feature where it flags messages rather than actually removing them[1] until and EXPUNGE is received.

[1] Rewriting the whole single mbox file is expensive. Doing some in place updates is cheap.

Message-per-file suffers from other problems.

[Tim Watts]

IMAP client are usually fairly intelligent about this (at least Thunderbird is).

Sadly, many users *abuse* mail with humungous amounts of detritis, attachments and never deleting anything. Telling the users off is a non starter though, especially if they are paying customers,

[The Natural Philosopher]

If you are prepared to spend the time and money, (£150 pa.a??) why not rent a virtual server and set up e.g. exim and dovecote on it?

Should be able to cope with ALL the family..

You can gave your won drop box and web server as a free throw in.

[John Rumm]

Well its one option - we have a co-lo server that is mainly used for one application but hosts a few other things like the wiki... not sure I really want to burden it with that though. I also like the idea that when it goes t*ts up in a big way, its someone else's problem, and they will set about fixing it fast.

[John Rumm]

I don't have any problem with that - the clients who moan most are not going to be upset paying a bit extra a year.

[John Rumm]

Its who we use for our co-lo server at the moment, and yes I would definitely recommend them for hosting. Not sure I want quite such a "roll my own" solution though.

Probably worth looking at if they have a virtual server option that has a decent control panel though.

[John Rumm]

Mostly silly numbers of messages... speaking to one today with 37K messages in his IMAP account. There will obviously be some attachments in there as well though.

[John Rumm]

Most are using Thunderbird on the desktop which defaults to caching all IMAP messages locally as well.

It definitely a back end problem though, since you will often get authentication timouts on larger folders, and things like their own web mail platform will timeout on some folders and refuse to access them, and that is without making any attempt to shift files around.

Your not a 123 reg customer then I take it ;-)

In recent years most of their hosting solutions have become comically slow. Domains and basic HTML web sites seem to be ok, but anything more complex or dependent on a DB backend is hopeless.

[Tim Watts]

I hate the fact you cannot set the TTL on the domains.

I plan to move my work domains sometime.

[Tim w]

thunderbird does have a common bug which makes it download emails again and again, every time.

Tim w

[Robert]

TSOhosts gets good comments in appropriate newsgroups - worth talking to !

[Tony Bryer]

+1 I've used FastMail for a number of years and am very happy with them.