I hate moving ISPs
Part of the problem of moving ISPs, especially when you’re moving a domain with it, is that it can take several days before DNS fully propagates. What this means is that you typically get email in two different locations for a period of time. While it’s nice to know some spam has found it’s way to my new 1&1 email home (meaning, DNS changes have propagated somewhere), there’s still some issues to attend to.
One of the things I am doing with my new setup is necessitated by a couple of factors:
- I don’t actually want to run an inbound SMTP server
- 1&1 actually has Virus Scanners
- 1&1 doesn’t support IMAP
I have a machine set up with an IMAP daemon that I can access from the Internet. So I don’t have to worry about inbound SMTP, I use a program called fetchmail to periodically poll 1&1′s POP server to download email. Fetchmail then delivers the email via the local SMTP agent (which is running, but it is firewalled off from the rest of the world).
One other thing fetchmail allows is: consolidation of the various POP3 accounts I have.
