RE: DreamHost admin contacts

[Jeff Saxe <jsaxe () briworks com>]

> Barring that, what recommendations might the NANOG community have for
> an extremely rock-solid e-mail hosting company?  I realize that may
> mean self-promotion, but hey, bring it on.

Some people, when they say "email hosting company", inherently mean "hosting specifically of Microsoft Exchange email, 
contacts, and calendar". If that's what you're after, then I would recommend my employer's chosen hosted Exchange 
partner, Intermedia <http://www.intermedia.net>. They maintain server farms of Exchange clusters, and they have a very 
good customer portal (both at the administrator-of-the-site level and the individual end user). They also have an 
FTP-up-a-PST-file-and-merge-it-into-a-mailbox function that makes the initial migration from some other Exchange 
repository faster and more parallelizable than without it. We are extremely pleased, and we have basically stopped 
hosting Exchange for our own customers on our own in-house hardware, just using Intermedia as a branded service.

Depending on your requirements (audit copy of every single email and and out, mandatory retention periods, BlackBerry 
connectivity, etc.), they probably can do anything you're asking for. Their uptime has been stellar except for one 
morning of about 3 to 4 hours, when a major MAN cable was busted around Manhattan somewhere and disconnected their 
datacenter. Other than that, we have not had the long, painful, tension-filled, customer-angering outage periods that 
we used to have with another provider which shall not be named. (OK, it will: GroupSpark. Stay far away from them.)

-- Jeff Saxe
Network Engineer, Blue Ridge InternetWorks
Charlottesville, VA
www.briworks.com