3 mail hosts in a week

Switching hosts was a matter of necessity. Running an entire site on wordpress on IIS was ridiculous. It’s fairly irrelevant to compare easyCGI and BlueHost, since anyone else making the choice will be choosing based on IIS vs. Apache, not a feature comparison or better support. However, i’ve very nearly gone back to easyCGI’s email hosting.

It’s not that easyCGI has great email hosting. their webmail is workable at best (better, since the last upgrade). they only provide POP3, not IMAP email. The reason i wanted to switch back? BlueHost doesn’t provide a catchall address. Apparently doing so would cripple their servers, because your email server is the same as your web server. and ‘all that spam‘ would bring the server to its knees. i’ve posted about this in their forums, but apparently all that does is bring out the idiot fanboys saying ‘your spam is everyone’s problem’. no, bluehost’s poorly configured servers are everyone’s problem.

Having had a catchall email for archgfx.net for 4 years on 2 webhosts, this seems bizarre to me. there’s no reason that one email couldn’t receive more spam than all the uncreated addresses put together. This is exactly how my email is set up. i have specific junk addresses: crappy, crapmail, webmaster, sales, etc. They come from using throwaway email addresses to sign up for things, and from standard addresses that bots think will reach the site owner. They all route to a yahoo inbox that i can dumpster dive for registration emails if the need arises.

The rest of the email to archgfx lands in my main inbox. this includes emails to sunburntkamel, adam, afreetly, af, and other addresses that were either easier to pronounce over the phone, or that people have erroneously remembered. I can’t possibly remember all of them, or attempt to generate all the possible misspellings and misrememberings of my name. so not having a catchall is a dealbreaker for me.

Back when it was first opened, i read derek’s post, and signed up for gmail hosted. I found out then that i couldn’t set up email aliases to non-archgfx.net addresses. at the time, that was a big enough pain for me to not bother using the service. now, having to keep two gmail windows open (one hosted, one standard) is less of an issue than losing mail that i’ve depended on arriving for 4 years. So i changed my MX records again, since hosted gmail beats the $3.95 a month for easyCGI.

I can’t set up email aliases on hosted gmail, but i can forward email. so i have one junk box (crapmail), that forwards its contents to yahoo. the other ‘big spam’ addresses are aliased to that one. it works, more or less. i have to think it would be easier on google’s servers for them to just let me alias to yahoo, but functionally, it’s about the same. and i doubt google’s servers are going to buckle under the strain.

Changing Hosts the hard way

In case you’re wondering where this blog dissappeared to today (and i knowyou weren’t), I finally got tired enough of dealing with PHP 4/IIS/the lack of REQUEST_URI that i changed hosts. Thusly, the CNAME record for this blog dissappeared for a few hours.

The main reason i switched was that i wanted was to be able to move wordpress into the top level directory, from /blog/. so i figured i’d try and do it all in one fell swoop. what’s more fun than trying to do something “mission critical” in a language you’ve just learned? so here’s what i added to my .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RedirectMatch 301 /blog/index.php/(.*) /blog/$1
RedirectMatch 301 /blog/wp-content/(.*) /wp-content/$1
</IfModule>

the first line is for old URL’s. the second line is for anything i uploaded and referenced in a post (especially images). so far both seem to be working. (i found the RedirectMatch example on this page). And, since you’re reading this, the CNAME record seems to have been set up, although i had to file a support ticket for that.

UPDATE: i forgot that i’d also added a prefix to my permalink structure (/blog/) so my redirects were all failing. should be fixed now (code updated)