“Organizations often have complex internal routing requirements necessitating an internal e-mail backbone”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
wrote Gartner Group\u00a0in \u201eEmail is a Commodity and other Fairy Tales<\/em>\u201c by Matthew Cain back in 2011. In 2013, Gartner called out “Sendmail\u2019s unique position” in the market for mail servers. Not long thereafter, Japan-headquartered Proofpoint, Inc acquired Sendmail, Inc. with its MTA technology to bolster its position in enterprise security and messaging. Proofpoint, Inc is the maker of the Sentrion <\/a>family of email appliances and cloud services.<\/p>\n On January 28, 2015, Amazon introduced a preview of WorkMail, a cloud-based mail solution (seen as an alternative to Microsoft Exchange). In 2015, Google hired Wietse Zweitze Venema<\/a>\u00a0who just happens to be\u00a0the original creator of Postfix<\/a>, the leading open source alternative to Sendmail that originated at IBM, is widely popular for its sophisticated simplicity, and is included in many Linux distributions of today.<\/p>\n In January 2016, Amazon WorkMail<\/a>\u00a0of the AWS fame has reached general availability while Google continues to struggle<\/a> with its cloud offering, pursuing new partnerships and innovating all they can.<\/p>\n Microsoft, having faced a mediocre acceptance for Exchange Server on Azure (mostly because of its steep hardware requirements in combination with the usual administration challenges), is pushing\u00a0Microsoft Exchange Online<\/a> as a Unified Messaging mailbox. Businesses,\u00a0on the other hand, are frequently overwhelmed with the complexity of managing mail services for themselves, but unlike consumers, are facing an existential challenge of staying on top of their communications.<\/p>\n Despite all the commotion in the world of e-mail-turned-Unified-Communications, one thing hasn’t changed much: consumers still expect their e-mail to be a free service. The merits of\u00a0email as a paid service are lost on individuals who are constantly confronted with a barrage\u00a0of email services\u00a0from competitors\u00a0who are more than happy to give their offerings\u00a0away “for free”. Consumers don’t see fit why anyone should\u00a0pay for email because they don’t mind\u00a0giving up some degree of privacy in exchange for\u00a0easing the burden on their budgetary constraints.<\/p>\n Businesses, on the other hand, are actually willing to pay for email services\u00a0in order to minimize\u00a0the administrative burden of running their own mail servers. Even so, by outsourcing digital communications, many of them\u00a0may be jeopardizing their long-term\u00a0survival.<\/p>\n There are no free lunches.<\/p>\n If you have ever used a Gmail account you know that creepy feeling that your mail service provider seems to\u00a0know more about the contents of your inbox\u00a0than even you do. Regardless of whether your bank has mailed\u00a0you a new credit card, an order confirmation\u00a0hit your email account\u00a0or you are meeting with a\u00a0realtor next week, Google is usually not only privy to this information but also\u00a0not ashamed to use it in order to\u00a0“personalize” your searches.<\/p>\n For consumers, such\u00a0customization, to some extent, equals convenience. For\u00a0a business, on the other hand, this quickly turns into Internet alteration and\u00a0is a whole new ball game altogether!<\/p>\n If you happen to be\u00a0using Google Gmail, you are allowing\u00a0the advertising giant\u00a0to\u00a0eavesdrop on all your digital correspondence. Google knows how to milk it for all it’s worth:\u00a0they will scan\u00a0your email activities\u00a0in search of\u00a0marketable information, monetize it through their partnerships<\/a>, and you will have to play nice. But why should you? Have\u00a0you ever asked a colleague or a friend of yours to send you an e-mail to your Gmail account over and over again only to realize that it would never arrive?<\/p>\n If so, then you know that awkward feeling in your stomach: What if it had been the\u00a0most important e-mail of your career\u00a0or the\u00a0business proposal of a lifetime? You would probably never\u00a0even know about it.<\/p>\n The same goes\u00a0for Googles business email services, Gmail for Work<\/a>.<\/p>\n Why should you share mission-critical information about your company with anyone? Why would you want to let Google decide which e-mails arrive in your inbox and which do not? There is a significant downside to\u00a0server-side spam fighting efforts by third-parties like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others:\u00a0you never know for sure which e-mails are delivered and which will be dismissed.<\/p>\n The best advice in a nutshell: never outsource mission-critical information\u00a0to your (direct or indirect) competitors. Google is in the business of making money off of you and your business is, in most likelihood, not big enough for them to care whether you survive their services or they survive you…<\/p>\n If it’s too good to be true than it usually is. In case of email services, there is always a big catch lurking in the fine print you probably never bothered to read. In IT, where sometimes only the biggest (or only the paranoid) survive, there are really no free lunches. For once, no one cares about the security of your data the way you do.<\/p>\n Should critical\u00a0information\u00a0about your business leak because your work mail provider was hacked, rest assured that your cloud provider\u00a0has the slimier and more reckless lawyers. The chance of your side winning any damages\u00a0is close to zero.<\/p>\n When it comes to\u00a0keeping your data safe, your team is more on target\u00a0than that of any external provider, because ultimately, it is all about the right incentives. In your business, data security trumps short-term profitability. The same cannot be currently said of third-party\u00a0mail services, Unified Communications or not. For example, as of this writing, none of the major providers of commercial email services that target businesses has bothered to apply\u00a0CSPs (Content Security Policies)<\/a>\u00a0to their web mail front-end, which is a shame indeed.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n If you want to tackle your e-mail needs the smart way, you can use\u00a0Postfix & Dovecot<\/a>, two open source applications for Linux\/Unix-style servers. (If spam is an issue, you might like to read:\u00a0How to Set Up Anti-Spam Filters Using Regular Expressions the Smart Way<\/a>).<\/p>\n You can find more about cyber\u00a0security\u00a0on CloudInsidr:<\/p>\n Troubleshooting PHP 7 and NGINX when using TCP Sockets with SELinux on CentOS 7 (RHEL\/Fedora)
\nMilter.org, once the largest open source resource center with a catalog of nearly 100 milters that can be used with either Sendmail or Postfix, has been shut down in 2015.<\/p>\n![\"Content-Security-Policy](\"https:\/\/www.cloudinsidr.com\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/MS_Office_headers.png\")
<\/a>There are no free lunches\u00a0or the catch to outsourcing\u00a0e-mail\u00a0services<\/h4>\n
Google sells your e-mail keywords to the highest bidder with your consent<\/h4>\n
![\"Google's](\"https:\/\/www.cloudinsidr.com\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Google_DNS_config.png\")
<\/a>![\"Too](\"https:\/\/www.cloudinsidr.com\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/SSL_Labs_mail_google.com_.png\")
<\/a>Lurking in the fine print of the ToS you never read…<\/h4>\n
\nhttps:\/\/www.cloudinsidr.com\/content\/troubleshooting-php-7-tcp-sockets-with-selinux-on-centos-7-rhelfedora\/#more-610<\/a><\/p>\n