The Truth About... Webserver Email Hosting
Don't put your Email on the server Mrs Worthington
Don't put your Email on the server.
The mailboxes are overcrowded
Spamfilters are pretty tough
And admitting the fact
You look like you're hacked
Just isn't quite enough
© Noel Coward 1935
Noel Coward was somewhat prescient in his famous song from 1935. A keen webmaster of his day, he knew that there are no advantages in running your email through the same server as your webserver - in fact quite the opposite.
It used to be seen as convenient, particularly for small companies, to self-host an email server. There were other benefits too - the King would like to point out that at no stage has he ever worked anywhere where clients intent on ignoring their hosting renewal bills could be brought to heel by a flick of "The Email Is Working" switch to off.
Unfortunately all that was in the internet frontier days before the Google Watershed, so today the webserver that hosts your website is not just a passive box sitting there dozing until someone gently wakes it up with a polite request for a website or email.
No, it's actually a piece of high-specification technology with considerable lineage designed to withstand a constant howl of unhinged demands, noise and traffic fired at it every minute of every hour, twenty-four hours a day.
While you are idly browsing your site, going to admire your Team Page yet again, behind the scenes literally hundreds of bots, hackers, proxies, hijacked accounts, Meta, criminals, weirdos and miscreants are frenziedly hurling DDOS attacks at your data ports in desparate attempts to gain access.
Indeed, it's not just the demented sector that's attacking your webspace, Microsoft deserves its own Firewall Rule In Hell for its exponentially-growing Outlook autodiscover.xml requests that have to be shut down on non-Exchange servers.
So the biggest risk with email self-hosting is probably Single Point of Failure, which means that if your web server is compromised, attackers gain access to both your website and all its email accounts. Not good at all.
The next largest problem is IP Address Blacklisting - if your server's IP address gets blacklisted - due to your site (or some other site sharing your hosting) being compromised - your emails may be automatically marked as spam or rejected by other email providers, causing major disruption. There will then be a a degree of pain involved in regaining your online reputaion.
And then there's good old Vulnerability Exploitation where a vulnerability in one service eg: a website plugin can suddenly be used to exploit another eg: gain access to email passwords. Keeping the software patched and up-to-date and keeping your fingers crossed is the only real antidote.
Always eager to help, the King compromises by only using forwarders to redirect your domain email so it ends up somewhere safe and secure - or if you really insist - Gmail. There you can easily create aliases to send out from your lovely domain email address and no innocent webservers get harmed in the process. Hooray!
Email delivering loads of headaches?
Let the King of Debug redirect you to the right place.
The Truth About... IT Departments
Heh. Look, the King of Debug doesn't have any problem with people who work in IT departments. He really doesn't.
In a way, he admires the austere way they have to view the world in the Information Technology ecosphere. The conflict usually comes when someone, the client, actually want to get something done.
Mr Client: I want this Marketing thing to happen.
IT Department: Here's a big list of why it can't be done.
King of Debug: (after hours of research) Here's how it could be done.
IT Department: Here's a big list of why it shouldn't be done, particularly your way.
King of Debug: Mr Client, IT Department won't let us do it.
Mr Client: I'll tell my Director (or myself if I'm a Director) to tell the IT Director off.
King of Debug: Oo-er
(time passes)
IT Director: Here's a compromise - you do it all and keep it away from us. PS I hate you and I'm holding a grudge.
King of Debug: Fine, fine. Why didn't we just do that in the first place.
IT Director: You're a smelly.
IT exists to keep everything flowing smoothly and, above all, safe. The safest way to keep a company's information secure is to lock it down completely, so it's sort of obvious why doing anything at all that needs to access that information (like a website) is anathema to IT Departments.
In ye olden days, only IT Departments knew how to set up and build websites. IT Directors (or Webmasters, as they liked to be known) liked to dabble with their Windows IIS servers and their Frontpage and their Java plug-ins to produce ugly, functional, anti-marketing websites whose cutting-edge technology impressed the board. Then other servers and browsers became successful.
HTML4 finally came out and websites escaped Windows Prison to end up in Graphic Designer Heaven. Add a bit of Javascript and Unix for the backend and behold! web designers were born. The webmasters nursed their wounds and invented the Millenium Bug to keep themselves looking busy.
Because of this historical antipathy, a second major hurdle was introduced - IT Departments are Always Right. This can be unproductive.
Ms Client: My marketing department can't see our website in the office.
IT Department: It's your website's fault.
King of Debug: No it's not, the IT Department needs to check their DNS.
(time passes)
Ms Client: Good news! It's fixed itself.
King of Debug: Fine, fine (sigh).
Ms Client: The website has a security error!
IT Department: It's your website's fault.
King of Debug: No it's not, the SSL certificate is out of date.
IT Department: It's your hosting's fault.
King of Debug: No it's not, the IT Department hasn't renewed their SSL certificate.
(time passes)
IT Department: Here's a new SSL certificate.
The overall effect is like Ungenerative AI - you don't get a solution until you can prove you've actually worked it out yourself - just don't get the King started on that 'DMARC that barked in the night' business - but in the future all IT will be AI - based, so there's going to be a bit of culture clash while that little lot sorts itself out.
It has been speculated that Beardy Bloke Syndrome (from the book "BBS - You Were Being Recalcitrant First, Pal" ©1997 Ray Philips, Oxford University Press) has had a significant bearing on the development of IT culture.
He couldn't possibly comment, but the King notes that, in many years of experience, the best IT Director he ever dealt with happened to be female. She worked for a medium-sized US company.and ctually got tricky stuff done, dealing with each problem in the same courteous and analytic manner that was totally without finger-pointing or ego. It was noticably refreshing.
Not speaking the same language as your tech support??
Try some straight talking from the King of Debug!