This is a common problem. In cPanel/WHM, you can limit the number of mails that can be sent from a domain in an hour. In windows or plesk, you cant do that. Windows 2003 is not a server operating system you know, it is just more of a secured (or so called) PC. You cant expect any features in it.

Though you can set limitations in the number of mails send per domain, spammers get hold of scripts that clients use in their websites to send mails, and spam the hell out of your server. And your server just stops working. Or, if your server is powerful enough, your mails just stop working.

Whats the best way to prevent that from happening? Use google’s google apps. The free email service for your jenifaa-sakura domain name.

When you create hosting, make your settings in such a way that the mx record that is created for each domain is set to google’s. When your client gets the hosting, ask him to sign up at google.com/a and get his mail box. There he will have no limitations of mails or mail ids or anything. And there is no way that your IP gets blacklisted.

And google has a great system that they dont let people abuse their systems easily. It is a neat system.

For personal use, gmail is great. But when it comes to commercial use, when you receive 10s and 100s of mails every second to various mail boxes in your domain name? You cannot trust google apps with that. What would happen to your mails if they suspend your account. And even if they wouldn’t it is always advisable to go for your own mail server when you have huge volumes of mails being transacted, and have so many different ids on just one domain, and if you would like your mails to be private than at someone elses mercy.

A mail server can be any web server that is colocated at any datacentre, installed with mail boxes and a mail server software. A mailserver doesnt usually come with apache and other web publishing or FTP provisions installed on it, as these would affect the performance of the mails.

A regular Pentium 4 Mail server can be used to handle over 500000 mails per hour, while, an optreon or a core 2 quad server can send upto 10 million in an hour, and process the same amount in receiving as well.

This kind of mail servers are for large companies that send out mails to several people outside their company, such as news letters or personalized stuff to various people.

A medium level software development company, having around 2000 employees need 2000 induvidual ids for the staff, and about another 1000 business ids, and let ssay every id sends out a mail every 2 mins, that is about 9000 mails every hour, and apart from the resources that you need to send out this many mails, you need to filter out the bounce mails, spam mails and forward the incoming mails to the appropriate mail boxes.

For all these, a Pentium 4 server should do great, provided it is not installed with anything other than the mail server software.

Let it be any business you run, any service that you proivde, you cant do much without a proper helpdesk in place. Providing support thru email without a ticketing system that assigns mails induvidual tickets with which you can track multiple communications for an issue will be very difficult.

Maybe with gmail, things would be easy since it saves emails as conversations, but it would do better with a helpdesk software. Something like kayako.

Kayako is a helpdesk software that I have used for quite some time, and have liked a lot. I must say, that its simply great. It has got all the features that you need in a helpdesk software.

Let me tell you how I have been using it. I never trusted my servers for mails. And, particularly, if my servers were down for some reason, all helpdesk mails sent to indyahozting would be lost. So I had taken email hosting seperately at directi, and had the dns for indyahozting with them too, so that no matter what happens to the site or the server, the mails dont go down, and all mails are received for us to chekc and reply.

Why didnt I choose google apps? Well, kayako’s smtp did not support smtp over ssl, and thats the only mode that google mail server accepts outgoing mails, and with directi’s mailing system, I could send out mails unsecured thru port 25.

So whenever someone sends an email, kayako fetches the mailbox, and parses them into tickets, and generating a ticket id, it sends mails to the creator of the ticket, and to all the users of kayako, that is to say, me and all my support staff.

To avoid confusion, and to save cost, I had taken only one mailbox from directi. Cost me about $5 per year. Yes, all of Indyahozting’s mails were working from a $5 mailbox, somehting that indyahozting’s servers couldnt deliver. So this mailbox is a catchall mailbox, and mails sent to any id @indyahozting.com reaches this box. When kayako fetches this box, I had created a very large set of rules in it, and with them the mails would get parsed into the appropriate departemnts, and the mails without any appropriate rules get ignored. All mails sent to ravi at indyahozting were forwarded to my gmail id, while sales, support, billing, info, and others landed in their own departments.

Doamin mails from directi and reseller club all got delivered directly to me and were not parsed by kayako.

It was simply a wonderful helpdesk. It cost about $30 a month, and was very much worth the money. The only problem is that, with the amount of mails that we were receiving, we had to host it on a virtual environment and couldnt put it on a shared hosting environment at all. That was the amount of resources that it was consuming at the run of each corn job.

And the database size was quite big, though we kept on eleminating any spam ticket that got into the system, kept user logins minimal and did all that we could to keep the size of the db low, but it kept on growing and growing and growing, and I really got scared one day, and decided to just use the internal helpdesk at awbs.

The problem when the database grows is that you will have difficulty in managing it, it will overload the database server, backups would be a problem, and you cannot migrate it anywhere. I did consider going for a hosted licnese with kayako, where they host the software on their own servers, but if our usage started overloading their servers, it could create trouble again, and not wanting to go for it, I just dropped the idea of continuing any longer with it.

But for serious hosting companies, it is a very good helpdesk system, and if you think you can afford it and put it to good use and extract the maximum out of it, you can certainly go for it.

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