I've raised the white flag.  I've had it with hosting e-mail.  I just purchased an e-mail hosting plan from GoDaddy, and I'm in the process of moving all the e-mail accounts.  And instructing customers on how to change their Outlook settings for the new system.  Hopefully, I can get everyone moved over in the next couple of weeks.

The sordid tale of the tar-baby from hell begins about four years ago, when I was having problems with the ISP that was hosting my e-mail service.  As things happened, I came upon an open-source mail server called Lumisoft that was written in C# and was able to handle SMTP relays, POP3 inboxes, and had a cute WinForms UI for administration.  It must have been the macho call of the wild - I can do this!  I grabbed an old computer, wiped it clean, installed Windows 2000 Pro on it and set up the mail server.  I had initially intended to use it for just my own purposes, and my wife and I used it for our e-mail.  But as things progressed, I started getting calls from customers who were getting angry that their ISPs weren't filtering their spam and letting e-mail viruses get through.  So I picked up SpamAssassin, and wrote a couple Perl scripts (shoutout: using ActiveState ActivePerl) that would comb the mail looking for spam to tag and also tossing out anything executable.  These Perl scripts were fired off by a little C# Windows Service I wrote in a half-hour.  And I'm happy to say I haven't had a single e-mail virus in Outlook in four years.  But things quickly deteorated.  To summarize:

• Network downtime - my ISP doesn't answer the phone on Sundays, so when do you think it goes down?
• Security Breach - a slacker at my ISP had a null VPN password, allowing a Japanese spammer to hijack my mail server as his own personal SMTP relay.
• Spam - causing an increasing burden on the old 450 MHz Pentium II.
• Abandoned E-mail Accounts - piling up the spam and filling up the disk
• Disgruntled Customers - I always know when the mail goes down, oh, I hear about it!
• Clueless Customers - who sign up for all sorts of online crap and wonder why they have so much spam!
• Hardware Issues - Ugh

I've had it up to here, and now I'm putting POSTAL to pasture. (Yes, I named the computer "POSTAL" as a joke.  Ha ha, just serious.)  I can get 100 POP3 e-mail accounts from GoDaddy for just $30 a year, and it comes with a webmail interface.  The admin interface is a pain in the rear, but I'm sure they can do a better job with uptime than I can.  I will miss having a bottomless e-mail account that users could send 100 MB files to, but the need for that has decreased as well.  At least I won't be wasting any more time on this.

This is better than going postal.  Don't you think?