New customers often ask us how they can deal with email using their website’s domain. The short answer is: There are a lot of options outside of freistilbox that solve this issue much better than we can.

With freistilbox, we focus on delivering world-class web hosting. Operating an email service is a completely different area of expertise. While we have experience in the setup of email infrastructure, running an email service at the same level of quality as our web hosting platform would require changes that we’re not going to make for the time being.

Just as freistilbox offers a much better web hosting solution than our customers could get by “just setting up a server”, we decided that our customers deserve a better email solution than us “just setting up a server”. That’s why we recommend using third-party services that make email their business focus.

Sending email

All freistilbox application and shell login boxes are equipped with a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) that allows your web application to send email. This alone doesn’t guarantee that your emails will be accepted by their recipients, though. If our servers aren’t formally authorised to deliver email in your (domain) name, there’s a high risk they’ll quickly get blacklisted as potential spam sources.

Additional measures like including our servers in your domain’s SPF record can lower that risk. But often still more effort is necessary to ensure your messages will reach their recipients.

That’s why we recommend using a specialised email delivery service in the first place, especially if you’re going to send more email than the occasional registration notice. Here are a few well-known options for transactional and marketing email delivery:

• SendGrid
• Mandrill

There are Drupal modules and WordPress plugins available that make the integration of these services into your web application easy. If you need any help in setting up email delivery in Drupal or WordPress, just get in touch with our support team.

Receiving email

Despite all the attempts to kill it, email still is much too critical for business communication to just provide it as an add-on service without giving it the focus it deserves. That’s why we don’t support receiving email on freistilbox at all. Instead, we recommend using an email provider such as the following:

• Mailbox
• Google Apps for Work
• FastMail

Our customers choose freistilbox because we’re good at what we do. It just makes sense to take the same approach with regard to email service providers.