Currently I am using a shared hosted setup with Dreamhost. It is working well, but as I start doing more custom RoR apps and other services I want to get into using my "own" box to have more control. It sounds like you guys are a perfect fit for this, but my one concern is POP3 setup and more specifically allowing clients to administrate their accounts. I haven't set that up before (at least on linux), but is there some apps out there that can help with this so it's easy for my clients to manage themselves? Will there be maintenance for me? Or is it best just to use someone a shared host to provide POP3? Thanks.
My approach has been to either hand off email processing to Google Apps (www.google.com/a/) Free or Premier, or FuseMail (www.fusemail.com), depending on the needs and budgets of my clients.
ISPConfig works really well for letting your users control their mail system. Its what I'm using on my server to host several domains with web and email (SMTP, IMAP, POP3).
The server's admin (you) can manage everything. The admin for each domain can manage the users on that domain. And each email user can login to change things like their spam filtering options.
TJ, How does fusemail.com work out for you? I'd like to get rid of all the email on my Slice as it's constantly getting flooded with spam. Is it easy to set up fusemail?
I use both google apps and fusemail for my personal email accounts and domains.
I have found fusemail to be excellent and, if you do not want to host your own email, I recommend them (there are alternatives of course, but I have used, and use fusemail).
Using fusemail is very easy to do and requires one MX and one TXT record in your DNS records.
I have found their spam protection to be spot on and have never had any downtime (that I am aware of).
Anyway, short of advertising for them, I say go for it.
Jim, sign-up for a test account with Fusemail (they have something like a 14-day money back guarantee) and seeing as the minimum you pay is 5 bucks, you can get to play around with their system and see how it actually works for you.
I'm probably going to go reseller with them because of a larger client and I gotta say my dislike is that for reseller accounts you no longer get a single pool of email storage space and whatever number of users that you could configure whichever way you wanted, but instead get to pay a price per mailbox, with different sized mailboxes.