New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
As long as the admin does not have the ability to set back the old password afterwards it will at least be obvious something happend. Not much of a barrier but it might still discourage random snooping.
Archiving was a highly requested feature. Have a lot of businesses that aren't huge but have legal/contractual requirements to retain all communications and not allow users to delete them permanently. While intended for that kind of purpose, incredibly useful for invisible snooping with ease.
I see. If thats the case having one more way to do it really doesn't make a difference.
No on those other hosts I mentioned, I can't download a zipped backup or any of those other things on other people's mailboxes. AFAIK I can add and delete mailboxes but that's it. I'm not even sure if I can reset passwords. I know that on Fastmail, I can't enable 2FA on my own mailbox unless I supply an SMS number (yeah SMS is insecure, I know) where they can send me an auth code in case I lock myself out. If I assign a mailbox to someone else (I'm not about to try because they charge extra for it) I'd expect it's the same thing. Certainly I'd prefer that my users handle their own pw resets, and it's probably best if I can't do it without submitting a ticket that creates a record, or at least without the system sending a notification to the user's backup channels.
As another thing, Fastmail and Gmail both have a feature where mailbox users can see the timestamps and IP addresses of the last few weeks of accesses to their mailboxes. That's also a nice feature that I hope you'll consider, and it would help with this issue too.
I guess there's 3 types of users involved: 1) the actual mailbox user; 2) the person controlling the hosting account (cpanel in this case); and 3) the actual host (server operator). We're calling #2 an "admin" but maybe that's not the best word. I'd think stuff like downloading zipped backups would be a #1 (or #3) function and not a #2 function.
Basically if you want to see typical practices for email hosting, I think you should try more email hosts, since cpanel is a bad example.
Weird, sounds like those others don't have many of the features that were most highly requested of mxroute. Not bragging that I have highly requested features, glad cPanel made most of them easy for me
It's weird to me because the whole time everyone requesting them kept telling me these were standard features that made me less functional than other mail hosts to not have. Like backups, archiving, account level filters.
I wonder how many mxroute customers are supplying personal mailboxes to multiple people. An actual admin (e.g. in the IT department of some company) supplying work email to the company staff wouldn't have the same constraints, since those are really the company's mailboxes and user expectations will be different than for personal email. What you're doing is probably ok for work email.
Tbh i personally wouldn't want those features either (even if i understand why others would) but then there is an easy solution: Set up the mailserver yourself and just get a relay to send outbound mails. Well kind of a solution since as long as the mails are on the server reading them is a simple
suaway and it won't get any better than this...I feel like it's a pretty good mix. Obviously hard to tell without snooping but just seeing the domains that I happen across in logs.
I don't see how that helps for stored mailboxes.
The idea of hosted email is you don't have shell access. Sure, the hosting company can get at the emails and will do so in the event of something like a court order, but normally (absent abuse) they're an arm's-length service provider, they don't have time or inclination to peek in anyone's mailbox, and they'd get in trouble as a business if it turns out they did so.
Contrast that with a more private situation, e.g. I was in an organization that had its own email system, and there was drama (and a legal case) because someone accessed someone else's email during a typical internal political conflict. It's best if the email server operators are far away and don't care about the organization's internal politics.
@willie i see where you are coming from. Fair point.
Well the bottom line is...
I know what you did. You should be ashamed. You thought no one was watching, but I was. I have a fetish for exim logs.
Work emails are not personal emails. Everyone should be aware of that. Personally cpanel setup was literally ideal for my needs and anything else would have been highly restrictive in comparison. Additionally the archiving feature was the first thing i looked for after setting up. So i suppose it goes both ways. You can't please everyone i suppose
There's certain functions that Jarland is working on, where I'm working in something else... Which isn't yet finished, but progress at 70% currently, it'll simplify the account setups.
As for the client area, I plan on doing a heavy integration there, including all cPanel functions, maybe some additional functions using the API itself.
It'll take time, but we got loads of plans :-)
If you take a look at mxroute.io's WHMCS you'll see what I mean, that was a very tough integration to do, but was able to retrieve better statistics from MailChannels API directly and such, it just takes time, and lots of planning to do.
One of my plans is definitely the ability to have a custom, or heavily modified WHMCS with cPanel integrated there, we'd basically just use it as backend, with further security, more features, and a streamlined setup.
This'll be done in our dev enviroment, and will for sure take some time to do.
Tickets answering time should be improved, the rest is cool.
We've been trying to, there's a small backlog, been doing quite a lot of tickets lately and sorting it.
Apologies if you're waiting on me to answer a ticket. I won't bore you with excuses but I will tell you it's not just intentionally ignoring.
I have to say I had the same thoughts and concerns as @willie especially concerning creating personal email accounts for family, friends, etc.
I also wondered how "private" any email account is from administrators of an email host; it seems not at all, regardless of which hosting company we're talking about, which might be a motivation for ProtonMail.
On another note, are there plans to aim for a perfect score on https://internet.nl/test-mail/ for mxroute's servers?
It can be accessed with little effort, much like an openvz vps provider or a shared web hosting provider. It is a trust relationship.
You should consider, of course, that it's not 100% about trust. It's also about liability. If anyone thinks I'm interested in losing a company that just hit $100k total revenue, for a little spying, I'd call them crazy. If I die tomorrow this is how I intend for my wife and daughters to live beyond a life insurance payout. I'm well aware that one mistake could cost the entire thing, I'm not going to make it or allow anyone else to.
Never heard of it but I typically shy away from arbitrary tests that usually seek only a check mark and no context. I'll briefly touch on it's points though:
IPv6 I'll gladly add when it matters, won't take but an hour to do the whole fleet and update DNS. There is currently no need as there is no case of ISP users only being able to access IPv6 addresses.
DNSSEC is live on mxroute.com, personal domains will be for customers to manage on their own.
DMARC is highly misunderstood, it's more about reporting preferences, it doesn't actually protect anyone from anything. Anyone not treating SPF seriously probably isn't utilizing the DMARC record anyway.
DKIM is effectively imaginary but you're welcome to use it on your domain, I recognize there's no benefit to me doing it on mine. Recipient services don't punish unsigned messages, Gmail displays a little tiny thing but no one else even does that. DKIM provides no way for the average user to trust one email over another. Always be suspicious of every email that matters, DKIM is supposed to stop you from having to and it won't. That's all it was supposed to do, it had one job. It can't be relied on to do that job. Someone has to stand up and say "Either implement this in a meaningful way or stop pretending this is a standard" and I'm willing to be first.
SPF is king, it's the most effective limiter. It's not going to prevent spoofing, especially when using shared infrastructures, but it provides more daily functional benefit for the average user than the two items above.
But not on the server named in my welcome email.
Yes, after my last thread, I caved and went with mxroute, despite it being overkill for my needs. I'm sure I'll be subsidizing others. But hey, who doesn't like to play with a shiny new toy.
Liability requires discovery and enforcement. Frankly I think it's simpler and more effective simply to avoid needing to trust at all.
Good point on the other domain I'll check on that. As for trust, it's basically that across the board with internet services. Trust no one or choose who to trust, there's no real alternative. Even the ones who claim to remove the trust variable, you have to trust that they've actually done it.
But it helps if there's lack of a motive. Yes the server operator could access my email, but why would they want to? Besides all the reasons you gave to not do it, my email is just plain not interesting to them. On the other hand, my (hypothetical) jealous spouse probably does think my email is interesting and might be unable to resist taking a peek now and then if it could be done without detection.
So I'd be fine with us both being under the same fastmail account (each with a mailbox that only they can access) but uncomfortable with both under the same mxroute account (the cpanel account can get into both mailboxes). You can't equate trusting the email host with trusting the cpanel account holder.
Anyway, some people for good reason don't WANT to be trusted. I rent a storage locker with my own padlock on it. The storage facility doesn't have a key and doesn't want one, because they don't want to get blamed if I look for something in the locker and can't find it. By refusing to let me trust them with a key, they and I get assurance that the misplaced stuff is my own fault. Same thing with safe deposit box at the bank etc. Yeah they could break in, but that's a much bigger deal and would be harder to cover up. It's the same thing with mailboxes: I'd rather not have access to anyone's but my own.
@willie As someone who threatens to post PMs when you feel you've been wronged, the idea of privacy must seem strange.
I didn't threaten, I asked permission and you gave it (though I didn't post regardless).
That depends on what your definition of "asked permission" is.
Well I guess that's good to note. Perhaps I should start opening my offer posts with "may not be the best product offering for someone who hosts email for family members that they expect to accuse them of abusing their trust."
Would seem oddly specific though.
As for trust, again, you trust someone implicitly based on what they've told you. How do I know? You're not bugging everyone you have service with about your trust issues. Don't know why you're on my dick about it honestly, as if every single service you have isn't playing your trust in someone you don't know. At least you can talk to me.
Don't forget "No Pedos".
Why not just check the practices of other email hosts and do what they do? I don't think it's an intentional feature on your part, since I don't think you were even aware of it til I brought it up. It's just a cpanel anomaly that hasn't come up before because most people don't focus their use of cpanel on email.
You gonna pay for the development and my new paycheck when I quit my day job? Why are you on my dick about this and pretending like you don't know exactly how it's a small business and not my only job?
Because he switches allegiance when it suits him.