[finaard]

> My business email system still does not work.

This is always the weird things in those rants. He's complaining that after 4 days his mails are offline.

Now I'm doing a mix of physical servers in rented rackspace, and rented servers - but even there I can have billing mixups where they deactivate servers for no good reason. And to get email working again the limiting factor would be the DNS TTL - new servers would be online somewhere else within hours of it going down. (And yes, I tested that just last year - one hoster threatened cutoff due to non-payment on a paid invoice, which prompted me to move the mail server just in case while getting this resolved).

[somewhatgoated]

I don’t get your point, what is the weird thing?

That he is complaining about his email being down or that he trusted AWS at all with email?

[rkent]

The only way that email is down for days for a competent sysadmin is if their DNS is also with AWS, so I assumed that was the case. Assuming that is true, what is weird to me is that, after deciding he hated AWS and left it, that he still kept his business DNS (the most important service there is) with AWS.

[hluska]

If you would have read the article, you would know that the writer had DNS hosted at AWS, would have read why he made that choice and would know of his plans to migrate off.

[finaard]

I assumed he just had DNS at AWS, but after re-reading I guess he has DNS _and_ domain registrations at AWS, which would be a special kind of stupid. That's something we were advising customers against already back when cloud wasn't a thing yet to enable fast transfers when stuff goes south

(to clarify: DNS+domain at the same service can be OK, as long as you have nothing else there. As soon as you start having other stuff, keep the DNS there, but move the domain registration away. Depending on which domain make sure you have auth keys, access to the admin domain or whatever would enable moving the domain without registrar cooperation. In my hosting days I did my fair share of emergency transfers and infrastructure to help companies get their basics online again after a SNAFU - totally doable to have first mail coming in again within a working day)

[panny]

>new servers would be online somewhere else within hours of it going down

Yeah, no that's not how it works with email. You have to build reputation for weeks or receivers throttle you.

[kassner]

It is pretty much unacceptable to have a domain bouncing emails, so I’d be out of the provider before the MX TTL even expires.

For outgoing emails, reputation is a huge issue, but at the same time it’s also fairly trivial to set up a (different) 3rd-party (gmail, outlook, sendgrid, whatever) with previous reputation so you can get back communicating.

[finaard]

I'm not running a spam business. I've been operating my own mailservers (and related infrastructure) for more than 25 years now, without issues.