[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] flamingcrumb:
Port88 looks very cool Austin. I am now on my third paid commercial Hosted Exchange account... they have all been very disappointing. I would rather get my Direct Push mail from a true enthusiast than some big useless corporation! I'd be happy to donate and don't have a problem rolling with the bumps.

Some thoughts/opinions/bits of knowledge for you to consider or ignore as you choose - it is your server!

Quotas: Port88 is free/donation based service with no bandwidth throttle - I think that is what your posts and website say, anyway... But for me, it is vital to keep out the Spammers or Port88 will just end up on abuse lists! Quotas seem like a great way to do this... most regular people - even busy ones, do not need to send more than a few dozen emails each day at most. Personally, I send about 10 and never to more than 2 receipients at a time. This is just my opinion, but I would like to know there is a tight throttle on outgoing mail to stop abuse ...because it hurts everyone.

By the way, I just checked Port88.org on the abuse look ups. You came up 100 percent clean! :D Nice! I also looked at your Exchange email headers on your email... very clean, the best I have seen.

A note about the various builds of SpamAssassin: I heard it is possibly used on 70 percent of mail servers around the world? (I have no idea what Spam setup you use.) The relevance is that although SpamAssassin is a very good setup and may indeed be the most widely deployed, it currently has trouble dealing with email sent from a Pocket PC through an Exchange Server (It sees the header as being a malformed/forged Outlook header sent by some kind of Bulk Ratware sender). Result is that clean legit Exchange emails had been scoring as high as 7 and getting junked. The folks at SpamAssasin have been tweaking the rulesets to fix this - but bear in mind some of the sneakiest Spam uses fake MS headers, so they don't want to let that through either. Result is that a fully legit Pocket PC -> Exchange emails now score just under 4 with the latest rulesets.

Still high, but just about usable... well, barely! :(

Worst example of a combo I have seen is at Mail2Web. They use Spam Assassin with their hosted Exchange Service. It is a total mess. It basically means that every single incoming message gets marked with the Subject tag ***SPAM***. Make it impossible to use rules to sort out the real Junk. You can adjust the level of their Spam filtering, but cannot turn off the Spam tag added to the subject line... which is on just about everything. It is just horrible.

How do you handle things at Port88? Can users make any adjustments to their Spam settings? Are Subject lines tagged? I now run all my mail through the excellent Mailscanner Config on my Apache/Exim domain hosting service then have it forward the legit mail only to my Exchange account for Direct Push. Only about 1, maybe 2, Spam messages slip though each day. I personally like being able to turn off the Junk controls completely on my Exchange account as I just don't need them - the double screening would just mess up a good thing!

Regarding the email address itself and the issue of using an outgoing alias, my personal choice would be to keep my true port88 address secret (not that I have one at present) and forward my prescreened mail into a Port88 account for Direct Push. My outgoing Exchange mail is currently sent using the aliased name of an account on my own domain. I strictly limit the mail servers I use and have them accurately recorded in my SPF record so the mail scanners can confirm they are legit. I never use the words "email address spoofing" - that is something I want no part in. The mail servers I use are accurately recorded in nameserver records readily available for DNS lookup.

I also use a Thawte Digital ID (S/MIME). Not sure it is much use though! Even with these efforts my Exchange mail just barely stays out of Junk folders, so most often I just do authenticated SMTP sends through my correct mail server direct from my Pocket PC. Much slower than sending through Exchange, but my mail will score zero to minus 2, instead of the 3 to 4 with Exchange!

Austin, we did trade a very brief email a while back in which I asked you about Spam settings. I think you simply said there were no adjustments for individual users but did not get into explaining how mail filtering was handled. It was an understandably short email as you are clearly a very busy guy.

Clearly, my coming to Port88 wasn't going to work for either of us at that time. I totally get you can't do much customiztion on free accounts, if any at all. On the other hand, the "free" part is of no special allure to me... I actually steer away from free services as much as possible. My interest in Port88 is the fact it is being run by someone who is clearly really interested in what he is doing...

I think your hosted exchange service may well be better than all three of the commerical offerings I have tried... especially when I went back and looked at your email headers which scored precisely zero on my Spam scanner! I would say Mr. Austin knows what he is doing and he cares about it! Now that is something! Free email? Not the point for me. Lots of crummy services offering free already. But I think you have something cool though!

If you feel like/get a chance to comment I will be interested to hear your thoughts. But I totally undertstand you may to busy for forum chit chat!:)