We need to assign each subscriber to our site a unique email address that will barely be used. What is the best way to do this? We could host it but may be better to be hosted elsewhere.
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What is the purpose of it if it will barely be used? Why would you not want to self host it?– EarlzMay 27, 2010 at 19:13
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Google Apps if you don't want to host it yourself (1000s of barely used emails will hardly make a dent in a server)– XorlevMay 27, 2010 at 19:14
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I'm assuming you've got a list of these subscribers, probably in a database. In which case you'll be best off hosting it yourself and using a mail server which will let you store your users in a database. Postfix/Dovecot with a MySQL or LDAP database on Linux would be good, but you'd need to give more details for a detailed answer.– WheresAliceJun 2, 2010 at 14:38
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It is not clear what you are looking for. If I were a subscriber with an e-mail account on your server that I rarely used, it would quickly become never used. If you want to contact me, ask me to provide an email address, then send to that. There are a number of methods of tracing bounce messages that do not require a new email address for each user.– BillThorJun 2, 2010 at 19:50
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4 Answers
The people suggesting Gmail or Google Apps aren't understanding your question/needs.
You need to explain how, specifically, the email addresses will be used even if it's not often. Are they only used by a self-managed internal service or are they somehow accessible to the users whose subscriptions are tied to the internal addresses?
We have a similar setup. We have nearly 30.000 accounts with a 20-30 % utilization rate. We use MDaemon. The main problem with this setup is the regular customer mailbox maintenance and customer-wide mailing operations which do a real hardware burden (mostly disk I/O). I think that we need some good customer analytics to find out who really and how uses their e-mail accounts.
1and1 has really good deals on hosting packages and email if you buy a domain.
If you do not want to host it then Google Apps provides email for your own domain and such.
