I’m Paranoid, just like you!

By: Adrian Otto

Over the years I’ve administered email systems that provided service to thousands of end user’s mailboxes. In the early years in the 1990’s most woes of a mail system administrator were about how to instrument the setting up of email accounts and related client settings, and changing passwords when they were forgotten by end users.

As the internet became more and more commercialized, spam exploded in our face. Everyone hates spam. Mail administrators hate it with a passion. They are doing everything they can to try and fight it… they filter, they black-hole, they tattle to abuse@whatever.com about it. Sometimes their own users send spam, and they get black-holed and need to jump through hoops to undo the damage.

At the time I reached my breaking point I managed email for about a dozen domain names, probably about two hundred mailboxes in total. I hated it. I hated every waking moment of it. The RBL’s that worked one day did not work the next. I’m convinced that e-mail system administration is the nastiest dirtiest job there is for a sysadmin.

People kept suggesting to me that I outsource email, which I shrugged off. I had problems with outsourcing:

1) I’m Paranoid about Uptime.

It’s hard for me to trust other people, let alone trust a company. And trusting a company with something as important as my email??? No way. I’m a control freak, and I was going to keep control at all costs. Yes, I hated email system administration. I wasn’t even a sysadmin any more, but I still did it just so that I could control it. It needed to be highly available. I simply could not trust anyone to do it better than me.

2) I’m Paranoid about Security.

Although email is inherently an insecure communication mechanism, all sorts of highly sensitive information is in there anyway. What would happen if a competitor would somehow get control of our email and read it. They could learn all of our secrets. No way, I’m keeping control of the security so that I know it’s locked down as much as humanly possible.

3) I’m Paranoid about Reliability and Control.

If something goes wrong, I want to be able to fix it quick. If I host it, I have full control of everything in the system. I can find what’s wrong and fix it fast. I’m really good at that.

I became a source code contributor for an open source email filtering system called bogofilter that uses Bayes filters to learn what’s spam and what’s not and filter based on that. I thought my spam filtering setup was the bomb! It worked great!

I got busier and busier with my work. I administered my email systems less and less. The better they worked, the less I would work on them because I had other fish to fry. The spammers got smarter and smarter, and soon enough my super cool spam filtering setup was becoming less and less effective.

So in 2006 something happened. I got super frustrated with spam administration. I was tired of having to keep finding or inventing better mouse traps to trap that nasty spam. So I thought to myself… There is an unlimited desire to send spam. Why? Because it works. If it did not work, the spammers would not be so determined to keep doing it. They are doing everything they can to outsmart you to get mail in your inbox. They keep getting smarter and smarter.

I thought some more… It’s like viruses. The hackers keep making better viruses, and the virus scanner software companies keep making their virus scanners better to clean them up and block them out. I needed something like virus scan, but for my email. I thought about all the technical ways to do it. I started hunting the web to find answers. I just wanted SOMEONE… anyone to handle this spam nonsense for me.

In the process, I stumbled across a company called “Webmail.us” (Later acquired by Rackpace and now called “Rackspace Email”). They had a great web site, said (at the time) they had 700,000 mailboxes in service. They had a complete spam filtering solution built in. The mailbox hosting was cheap. So cheap I could not ignore it. They were charging less for complete hosting of mailboxes than I was willing to pay for outsourced spam filtering.

In 2006 I did an experiment. I put my own domain name where I get my home email on webmail.us to see how it worked. I told myself that if it worked really well that I might switch all my email over to it, and wash my hands of email sysadmin work and all the spam nonsense that goes along with it. I did it for a month. It worked great. It was fast, it never went down. I got no spam. I was thrilled!

I did the unthinkable. I outsourced my email!

One by one I migrated all of my domains, and all my mail users over to the hosted system. I have never looked back. The system has been rock solid. The few problems I’ve seen over the past three years have been really minor, and solved more quickly than I would have been able to solve using my own systems. I had been converted.

I was so happy to finally be free of all the nuisance of administering email and spam filtering systems. It was great. Years later I ended up working with Rackspace, and told them the story of how I used and loved the email platform. I later met the people behind the system, and it was no wonder that it works as well as it does.

If you are still administering your own email… especially if you are running an Exchange system in your own office building. You need to take a serious look in the mirror and ask yourself why you are not outsourcing it to Rackspace Email. The truth is:

1) It’s more expensive to host it internally. Run the numbers.
2) Your uptime it a lot worse. Measure it.
3) Your security is no stronger. Audit it.
4) You are paranoid, just like me. Yes, you are.

You trust your bank with your money. You trust your phone company not to spy on all your phone calls. You do this stuff without worrying about it. These things are much bigger leaps of trust than outsourcing your email.

From me to you… do yourself a favor. Run the same experiment I did. You’ll be delighted. I work for Rackspace now, so my view is corrupt, right? Don’t take my word for it, because you’re paranoid. Just try it and see.