domain e-mail without transfer?

[pctech]

As my mail has been flooded again with lots of mail from those generous folks in Africa that want to give me unbelievable sums of money in exchange for use of my bank account I have been looking at IDNet's mail package with greylisting but unless I am reading the page incorrectly I have to transfer the domain for £24.50 a year and then purchase a mail package.

I have registered my domain with my existing registrar for a period of 10 years and also paid for private registration on it so would like to leave it where it is and just point the NS records at IDNet's servers.

Is this possible?

[JohnH]

I'd be surprised if it is, without money changing hands. I think you will need to sign up for a hosting package somewhere along the line, either with IDNet or elsewhere. Then you can just change the DNS to whoever the host is you sign with.

There's nothing to stop you staying with your registrar, though.

HTH.

[Rik]

Does your current registrar handle the email, Mitch? If not, then I think support could probably work something out for you, but it would infer using one of the commercial mail packages, though a standard IDNet.com address gets pretty well swept for spam.

[kinmel]

Why not have emails to your own domain  automatically forwarded to your idnet.com email account, where the spam filters will process them and then you collect your email from the Idnet mail system

[pctech]

Let me explain my current set up.

Domain is registered with Network Solutions where I'd like it to stay.

I currently have a mail package with 1and1 (no problems I might add) and the spam filter is doing a decent job but I still have to wade through the spam folder once a week via the webmail interface to check it hasn't inadvertently stuck something in there thats actually important but I'd rather just not receive the junk so thats why I was looking a mail solution that included greylisting.

To facilitate this the Nameserver records are pointed at 1and1's nameservers so my question is if I took out a mail package with IDNet can I just adjust the records or do I need to transfer the domain to them as registrar.

Network Solutions charge a monthly fee for mail forwarding so that would defeat the object as I can just set up a forward with 1and1 but I'd be paying for a mail package I wasn't using.

[Rik]

Afaik, Mitch, you can just change the records.

[JohnH]

To facilitate this the Nameserver records are pointed at 1and1's nameservers so my question is if I took out a mail package with IDNet can I just adjust the records or do I need to transfer the domain to them as registrar.

You can definitely just change the DNS. I run quite a few domains where the registrar is different to where the DNS is pointed. At the end of the day, a registrar is just a domain management company that handles the activation and subsequent renewal. You can host with them or elsewhere.

[psp83]

pctech, if you don't get anywhere with IDnet, drop me a PM. I might be able to offer a solution for you.

[pctech]

Thanks Paul, I'll have a proper look at things over the next few days.

[Adam]

Google Apps for your Domain is a pretty good solution. I never had a spam issue with Gmail/GAfyD, and I have been using Gmail since 2004.

[pctech]

Thanks for the advice Adam.

[Adam]

No problem. It's an often overlooked (and free!) solution.

[pctech]

Was going to ask whether you are using the free version.

[Rik]

We like to anticipate the next question around here, Mitch.

[nowster]

Network Solutions is one of the worst and most expensive domain registrars. There are much better and cheaper alternatives.

I have my own domain with Gandi.net (a .co.uk is £6+VAT^‡ for 24 months, .com/.net/.org/.info is £10+VAT^‡ for 12 months). They throw in a number of email addresses and a simple website as part of the package. They know their stuff and respond to your emails. (I don't use their email service myself -- I run my own VPS with Gandi and the email is handled on that.)

As to greylisting: I don't use it any more. Instead I've a mixture of DNS blacklists and spamassassin. (Almost all of my spam comes through the forwarding from my debian.org email address, which the blacklists won't catch.) The problem with greylisting is that you're at the mercy of the sending server's retry policies.

When I ran an ISP, I found that the greylisting process was eating a lot of memory on the mail server. I also had a perl "milter" to handle the DNS blacklists and fell foul of perl's poor garbage collection in multi-threaded processes.


^‡French VAT at 19.6%.

[pctech]

I've paid up the domain now so not intending to move it, main reason I went with NS is because I know they do private registration.

I'll have a look at Gandi.net though cheers.