Rourke on Technology

A week or so ago I wrote about why GMail fails to meet my email needs. I’ve used IMAP for years now, and before using IMAP I read my email on the same server it was stored on. You know, using mutt (similar to elm and pine). I recently switched service providers and in the process of doing so poked around a little bit to find a top notch email provider. After looking at various providers and reading posts in various forums, I ended up choosing tuffmail. Sixty days have passed and I’m happier with Tuffmail than I could ever have hoped to be. What makes Tuffmail so great?

• amazing spam protection
• reliability
• responsive and helpful live support
• feature, features, features
• vision (RoundCube, LDAP, SynchML)

There’s an active community of email fanatics out there, so I had a number of resources to fall back on when investigating imap providers. The single most helpful site was Nancy McGough’s IMAP write-up and list of providers at Infinite Ink. Nancy’s blog also has some really good posts on things like spam filtering with sieve and IMAP tagging. The folks and the archives over at emaildiscussions.com were also really helpful in nailing the fine differences between the various services. The reliability stats someone posted helped quite a bit, for example. Someone at MIT also did a great job summarizing some of the features in the top five services out there in an easy to read chart. My bookmarks on this topic are all here.

I signed up for trial accounts with fastmail, tuffmail, and runbox. In the end, I chose tuffmail based on my experience using all three via those trial account. Tuffmail made my decision easy — the spam protection by itself was so far ahead of the others that I was sure from about two days into the evaluation process.

Tuffmail does everything you can imagine to protect users from spam. To start with, they do an amazing amount of filtering at the MX level — before your mail has even been accepted by their mail servers. In the screenshot to the left you can see the configuration options available for each email address. The level of restriction is adjustable for each individual email address rather than at the mailbox or account level. Allow and deny lists can be configured per address, per domain, and per account. These white/blacklists can also be enforced either at the MX level or via a scoring modifier which then feeds into SpamAssassin. Check out tuffmail’s website for more information on the MX level spam filtering.

Once the email has been accepted by tuffmail’s servers, SpamAssassin (SA) takes over. Tuffmail users have very detailed control over how SA scores and deals with your incoming mail, including what it does to the headers, and how it delivers mail that scores higher than the two user-defined thresholds. If the tuffmail MX filtering and SpamAssassin aren’t enough protection, you can also set up user-level bayes filtering (much like DSPAM). As you can see from the diagram to the right, you have very detailed control over what happens when the bayes filter tags a message as spam or ham. The best part, though, is the fact that you get to train the bayes filter yourself without needing to interact with the web interface. You simply move improperly identified messages into Auto-Train/Spam or Auto-Train/Ham folders and the tuffmail server takes care of the rest.

Still not enough Spam protection? Tuffmail scans all email with either ClamAV or Sophos. Still not enough? You can add your own custom rules using Sieve filters and not only filter out more “spam,” but also filter mail into different folders or auto-tag mail based on where it came from(eg: list mail and automated reports).

I use every bit of spam protection tuffmail has to offer, and I’m satisfied. My only Sieve rules are used to block messages from big companies that claim to allow unsubscribe. This can be done with an allow list, but it was easier for me to bulk-add the list as as Sieve filter. Right now, I’m down to less than 10 spam messages in my inbox a week with zero false positives. I could have zero spam in my inbox, but I prefer to have none of my legitimate mail blocked.

Tuffmail also generates very detailed reports which allow you to see what mail is getting blocked at the MX level. These reports can be emailed to you nightly, or you can just go view them on the tuffmail website. The current day’s report is real-time, so you can check that report if you’re not receiving an email message that you expect. If the message is being blocked or slowed down (by greylisting) then you can just add the sender as an allowed sender and you’re good to go.

Reliability is perhaps the only thing more important than great spam filtering. I poked around a bit and found some discussion on emaildiscussions.com where folks were discussed reliability of the leading imap providers. One person even posted an uptime report. By all measures, tuffmail is the reliability king. Fastmail was a close second, but a month after I signed up for tuffmail, fastmail suffered extensive downtime. I was happy to be a tuffmail customer.

Tuffmail has quite an extensive list of features — all the standard stuff, and a whole host of things unique to tuffmail. Security features are fully represented, with secure connections for everything. The auto-BCC function allows me to easily save a copy of all outgoing mail no matter where I send it from. Auto-delete is a handy way of making sure List and Junk folders don’t get too big. The ability to send and receive messages up to 100MB means that I never have to worry about email bouncing because my provider couldn’t handle the size.

I have two tuffmail mailboxes right now; one for me and one for my wife. Tuffmail allows me to control both mailboxes from one login to the admin interface in a very clean and logical way. This made so much sense that I was shocked to see it missing in the other two services I tried. Check out tuffmail’s website for a complete list.

It is generally not a good idea to chose a product or service based on what the vendor is planning to do in the future. I didn’t chose tuffmail purely based on their vision because I would’ve chosen them simply based on everything above. I am, though, glad to see that tuffmail has looking ahead and is trying to find ways to make email that much better. For examples, tuffmail has a beta version of the RoundCube webmail client running in a “beta” web client area so folks can try it now. Tuffmail is also looking at LDAP and SyncML for addressbook synchronization. These are features I’d very much like to see in the future, and no one has them today.

Is tuffmail perfect? No, they’re not. The administrative interface is complex and hard to use. At least that complexity is somewhat mitigated by the excellent online documentation and the amazingly responsive support staff at tuffmail (every question I asked got a detailed response within a couple of hours). Fastmail offers file storage and web hosting, while tuffmail is pure email. I don’t see this as a bad thing — I’d rather use another provider for web hosting and file storage. Tuffmail’s indexing needs to happen more often so searches don’t return stale results.

All that said, though, tuffmail is as close to perfect as you can expect to find in an email provider. Without a doubt, my tuffmail account is the best email account I’ve ever had.