Email Reliability

[dleelee]

I am considering moving quite a few accounts over to BlueHost as I am having problems with my current hosting company. Since email has always been the bane of my existence, I am interested in knowing how reliable BlueHost's email service is before I move forward. Any input would be appreciated.

[felgall]

The only things I have noticed regarding BlueHost email are:

Setting up forwarders to external email addresses without also saving the emails in a n address on your account means that no filtering is done on the forwarding emails. The spam gets forwarded along with everything else. If too many accounts on the same server set up something like that then the server gets misidentified as a spam source by other sites like AOL and BlueHost then has to argue with them to get the access restored. This usually only affects individual servers every so often so unless you are unlucky enough to be on an effected server the only way you notice it is if you visit the forum and see the complaints.

The other thing is that BlueHost set the outgoing email limit to a maximum 50 emails per hour to help prevent the servers being used to send spam. They will increase the limit to 500 on request but will not increase it higher than that. Where you have mailing lists with lots of recipients you need to stagger the sends so as to keep under that limit. The limit applies to your whole account and all the email addresses you have in it.

You can use BlueHost for hosting and still run your emails from somewhere else using the same domain name by updating the MX record for your domain via an option in the control panel.

[dleelee]

Thanks for the feedback. Any suggestions for using another email provider? Thanks again.

[HardD99]

I just got finished setting up my email through google. basically a copy of gmail for your own domain, and free up to 100 email accounts (i think its 100). I love gmail's spam filters and the whole setup, and have been using gmail since the original invite only beta and will have a hard time ever switching.

You can check it out at:

www.google.com/a

they will try and sell you the premium service, but just click around until you find the free one.

[felgall]

Do you really need a private domain mail? if not, my suggestion is to just use gmail and forward it to your email, bluehost has been good with email sending for me.. But just like any provider there could be flaws, so my suggestion is use BH but TEST your email to be sure that it is receiving files flawlessly.http://www.image-jump.com/image/Q/8.gif

Just my 2 cents,

Kody

My understanding is that you can use gmail for your private domain mail accounts. The setup on the BlueHost end is to point the MX record for the domain to gmail. You set up the rest through gmail.

[dleelee]

Thanks for the gmail info. I was not aware that this could be done.