In an earlier post I outlined the platform that the Linux VMs will be running, dubbed the “atomicSTACK”. But as well as this optimised and accelerated LAMP stack we’ll be offering an array of other great features.
From my experience of running HostNexus for 10 years and listening to feedback from clients I understand what the web hosting client needs from a web hosting service. People want reliable servers, fast websites, decent backups, easy software installs, webmail to rival Gmail and to not be locked in to any contracts. And resellers want the ability to brand everything and offer the aforementioned features. This post deals with email related features.
ZEN Filtered Email
Spam is a huge issue, and to be honest SpamAssassin doesn’t go far enough to battle the issue. It does a good job on the spam that reaches the server but people just don’t want to deal with that amount of spam. My @hostnexus.com email address is 10 years old and I get on average 150 spam emails per day that get tagged by SpamAssassin and maybe 5-10 spam emails that SpamAssassin does not catch even with an aggressive scoring of 4. You can set SpamAssassin to delete spam when it’s tagged which is a great feature but not everyone wants to go that extra step when configuring SpamAssassin and the regular user might not even configure SpamAssassin at all. SpamAssassin is also a huge resource user on a busy mail server. I’ve seen comments from clients many times about the amount of spam they receive, even if they can deal with it to some extent with SpamAssassin and it’s one of the main driving factors of people switching to Google Apps.
There are various other solutions available like expensive hardware spam beating appliances and custom filtering and we’ve tried many over the years. There is one solution that stands out in its effectiveness and simplicity and that’s ZEN – zen.spamhaus.org. It’s an RBL and it cuts out over 95% of spam in my testing. We use it on our HostNexus server and from over 150 spam emails a day I get maybe 5 that SpamAssassin can deal with easily. So on AtomicVPS VMs we will be using zen.spamhaus.org without exception and clients will get hardly any spam and we won’t have the resource overhead of SpamAssassin marking 100 emails per second – win/win.
One issue we found when trying to deploy Zen on HostNexus servers was that some clients would find their own IPs blacklisted in the RBL and therefore could not send mail via our server. This blacklisting could be due to an ISP range being banned or maybe they have a compromised PC sending spam (another big problem). cPanel uses Exim as a mail server and with Exim we can also add exceptions in the RBL on a per domain basis. So if a client reports that they can’t send mail due to being listed in zen.spamhaus.org we can just add an exception for them. This will mean that they don’t get the benefit of the awesome spam filtering but it’s still a solution.
Enhanced Webmail
I’m a huge webmail fan, in particular I love SquirrelMail. On AtomicVPS we’ll also be offering Roundcube, Horde and Atmail. SquirrelMail and Roundcube have active developer communities producing themes and plugins to enhance the opensource software and we’ll be providing a number of custom skin options on both.
For SquirrelMail we’ll be offering the Outlook theme which comes in 4 colours:
There are a few other awesome skins for SquirrelMail and I’m sure we’ll add some more soon after the launch.
For Roundcube I have purchased two skins – Alpha Skin and LightCube.
Alpha Skin:
LiteCube:
Roundcube is definitely lacking some of the features already built in SquirrelMail but it’s still popular. But SquirrelMail with the Outlook theme is simply awesome (I’m loving the Silver variant).
Webmail Logins
One thing that has always bothered me about cPanel webmail is the inability to login straight to the webmail program of your choice. When you login you get taken to the cPanel webmail page which lists all the webmail choices and you have to click one to enter. This is actually by design as the page also lists other mail features like AutoResponders, Forwarders, SpamAssassin etc. But many people want to login direct and bypass that cPanel webmail page so we developed a script that does exactly that. The script actually incorporates both cPanel and webmail logins and can easily be modified to just allow login to the webmail program of choice. The script is uploaded on this page. It requires a separate PHP file that we’ll provide when we launch.
In Development
One thing we want to do is give resellers the ability to brand SquirrelMail with their own logo. In future we’ll see if we can expand it to other webmail programs but for now we’ll focus on SquirrelMail. Hopefully it will be a WHM plugin so when a reseller sets up an account they can select the webmail skin and upload a logo. And with the above direct webmail login resellers can enjoy 100% brandability from cPanel to webmail. This is still a work in progress and we’ll see how it goes. 
More on features in teh next few posts.
