David Gardiner - Domain hosting

Migrating away from Google G Suite Legacy free edition (part 3)

2022-05-17T17:00:00.000+09:30

The latest news from overnight - looks like Google has relented slightly with two weeks to go. If your use is personal you can now stay on the no-cost G Suite Legacy!

See the latest revision of the Upgrade from G Suite legacy free edition help page for details. Specifically:

If you’re using the G Suite legacy free edition for non-commercial purposes, you can opt out of the transition to Google Workspace by clicking here (requires a super administrator account) or going to the Google Admin console. You can continue using your custom domain with Gmail, retain access to no-cost Google services such as Google Drive and Google Meet, and keep your purchases and data.

If you don’t take any action, your account will be suspended starting on August 1, 2022. To reactivate your account, you will either need to upgrade to Google Workspace or opt out of the transition for non-commercial use.

That's the risk when you force customers to make a choice - they might not choose to stay with you but take the opportunity to reevaluate the market and realise there may be better options out there.

For me, migration is still an option but at least this removes the urgency.

Migrating away from Google G Suite Legacy free edition (part 2)

2022-05-15T23:00:00.000+09:30

Since writing my last post on leaving Google G Suite Legacy, I not only got some good feedback on Twitter, but also came across some more useful resources.

Just over two weeks left in May and still the waiting list is not available. If one were cynical, you might think Google didn't want you to leave!

Resources

There's good discussions at:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuitelegacymigration/
Whirlpool - Part 1 and Part 2

Both are great reads - and I feel somewhat affirmed that others have come up with similar solutions. It's likely someone has already done a similar migration to what you've decided to do, so worth reviewing their experiences.

Cheap or paid

Simon Waight shared his experience and makes some good points:

I stopped worrying (too much) about cost and focused on the importance of reliable, secure email. I am in a similar boat. You want Exhange plans for sure. I also pay for Defender which gives me strong malware and phishing protection.

— Simon Waight (@simonwaight) May 10, 2022

I get $0 work discount so I pay full fare. 6 accounts using a mix of business accounts. Some kiosk accounts and a couple of basic accounts so we get Exchange for everyone. Last two are Business Premium to get desktop apps.

— Simon Waight (@simonwaight) May 10, 2022

Make sure to setup DKIM and DMARC for email.

— Simon Waight (@simonwaight) May 10, 2022

So yes, there's definitely an element of you get what you pay for. And if you're not paying for it, then that probably means you're the product! Weigh up the pros and cons of that.

Cloudflare Email limitations

At the time of writing, Cloudflare Email does not support forwarding to multiple email addresses. I have a few Google Workspace 'Groups' configured that forward to multiple addresses, that is a problem.

If you're in the same boat and plan to go down the email forwarding/routing approach, then there's probably a couple of solutions:

Choose a different email router service (https://improvmx.com/ was mentioned in the conversation linked to previously)
Forward to one email address and then create a rule for that mailbox that then forwards those emails to the intended recipients.

Microsoft 365 Family with GoDaddy

Apparently there are ways to 'trick' Microsoft 365 into thinking you've switched your domain hosting to GoDaddy without actually doing it, in order to take up the custom email hosting offer. I won't link to them here but you can find them if you're really interested. Just be aware that you're putting yourself in an 'unsupported' situation.

Setting a Reply-To address

In GMail you can set a different Reply-to address from the one that the email is sent from (eg. the From address can be different to the Reply-To address).

Outlook.com allows you to set the 'From' address when composing an email. If you have aliases set up with your Microsoft account, you can choose one of those as the From address too.

Ideally, you would want to do some testing to see what the experience of receiving an email from one of these accounts looks like. Does it get flagged as spam? When you reply does it pick up the correct email address to reply to?

Finally, returning to one of Simons's points, will it work with SPF, DKIM and DMARC?

Migrating away from Google G Suite Legacy free edition

2022-05-10T09:00:00.000+09:30

Earlier this year, Google surprised everyone by announcing that their 'G Suite Legacy Free Edition' would be soon no longer. What has been a free service for many years is now finishing up. To stay with Google you will need to pay for one of their commercial offerings, and to do so by 1st June 2022. This impacts me because my 'gardiner.net.au' domain currently hosts email through G Suite Legacy Free.

I don't object to being asked to pay, but the price rise is not insignificant.

So I need to plan what to do.

I currently have 9 accounts configured.
I make extensive use of shared calendars between some of those accounts
For most users, calendars and contacts must also be considered

Stay with Google

If it was just my immediate family, I might consider this, but I have extended family also using the domain so asking them to start paying over $AU100/year is not tenable. But to be honest, even for the 5 in my family I'm not super excited to have to pay around $AU550/year.

I should point out that Google do offer a 50% discount for the first year, so that might cushion the blow a little.

Leave Google

What ever you choose, you probably want to make use of Google's "no-cost option" to maintain the Google accounts associated with your domain (except for email).

Customers who choose this option will retain access to the no-cost version of Google Workspace services such as Google Drive and Google Meet, and additional Google services such as Google Search, Google Maps, and YouTube. You will also retain access to paid content such as movies purchased in the Google Play Store

Sounds useful, though as at the time of writing the waiting list to participate in this is not yet available!

Leaving Google will also involve migrating the data out of Google and into whichever provider(s) are chosen.

But if you leave Google, where do you go?

Other email providers

There's lots of other email providers besides Google and Microsoft. Trouble is most of them are just email - very few offer calendars and contacts, and those that do may not integrate nicely with mobile devices. So while I did look into a few of these (Fastmail and Protomail were two I saw recommended on Twitter), I don't think they're for me.

Microsoft 365 Family

I do actually have a current Microsoft 365 subscription. It turns out as part of that you can get custom domain email hosting BUT it's limited to 6 people and requires that your domain be managed by GoDaddy.

I would love to make use of something I already have, but I'm over the 6 person limit, plus I'd prefer not to be locked in to using GoDaddy.

Use an email redirection service

I did discover there's some cheap or free email forwarding services out there. Conceivably you could use that to forward email originally sent to username@customdomain.com, onto username@gmail.com or username@outlook.com

Cloudflare actually offer something like this, but be aware it's in beta, and I'm not aware if they plan to charge for this in the future.

Depending on the service, you may not be able to send email as username@customdomain.com as they either don't offer an SMTP service, or you might have to pay extra for that.

This means that your mails will be sent as as username@gmail.com or username@outlook.com. If possible, you will want to set your emails to add a Reply-To header to suggest that replies should go back through your custom domain eg. username@customdomain.com.

Microsoft 365 Business Basics

AUD108/year (inc GST) https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-365/business/compare-all-microsoft-365-business-products, is the entry-level plan for Microsoft 365 that includes email, Office apps and services. This happens to be the plan I've chosen for the Adelaide .NET User Group for email, but especially as it includes Microsoft Teams for running online meetings.

If one is considering one of the Microsoft 365 business products, you should check out the Microsoft 60% discount promotion.

This link takes you to an online chat where you provide contact details for yourself and your domain. Microsoft will then verify that you are currently using G Suite. In my case they then called the next business day (from US phone number) and then asked me to add a TXT record to the domain to confirm that I had administration rights over it. Once that was confirmed, then they can provide a discount code for you to purchase one of the Business Basic, Business Standard and/or Business Premium plans. The discount code is only valid for 24 hours, so if you're not ready to purchase right away, you can resume the process any time up to 2nd August (when the discount promotion ends).

Microsoft Exchange Online (Plan 1)

AUD72.60/year (inc GST) https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-365/exchange/exchange-online is essentially a business plan that only provides email, calendar, contacts and tasks. No Office applications are included.

Where to next

My goals are to minimise the initial and ongoing costs, minimise the the effort involved in migrating, and maintain similar services to what we're used to now.

I don't mind admitting I'm a bit nervous about this. I want to get it right and not break my users' email, but I know there's likely to be things I've overlooked that could catch me out.

Do I need the full services of Microsoft managing all the email flowing through my domain, or could I get by with a forwarding/routing option? I need to evaluate the pros and cons of both.

Actually even if I did go with one of Microsoft's commercial options, not every user may necessarily need the full email service. I could still use Microsoft's email forwarding there to forward to an external account!

Either way, I need to make a decision in the next few weeks!

Upgrading to new “new” outlook.com (ADDriverStoreAccessNonLocalException)

2016-10-30T12:10:00.001+10:30

A few weeks ago I received an email saying that I would be upgraded to the new outlook.com. Then last weekend I noticed I’d stopped receiving new emails and figured the migration had begun.

My email setup is a bit unusual. I have a custom domain “gardiner.net.au” and email for this domain is handled by Google Apps Free edition (legacy). This is the version of Google Apps (now called “G Suite”) that Google no longer offers for new customers, but maintain for existing ones.

A while back when Google and Microsoft were being less than friendly about GMail support with Windows Phones (combined with a weird problem on my phone where using GMail was using unusually high cellular data), I switched to using Outlook.com. To make this work, I configured Outlook.com to regularly pull email from GMail, and to send all outbound emails back through GMail too (so that SPF and DKIM would continue to work).

That setup worked well for my phone, and also for family calendar sharing (seeing as my wife Narelle had been using Hotmail for ages).

The downsides were that there appeared to be a sporadic bug with the email import process. Just occasionally emails would get ever so slightly corrupted. Most times you could still read them, but sometimes just one character changing was enough to render it completely unreadable.

I lived in hope that the migration to the new O365 infrastructure would resolve the corruption problem.

So where was the new Outlook.com? Every time I tried to log in, I kept getting a “Sorry, something went wrong” page, and if I looked at the details of the error, it mentioned this “ADDriverStoreAccessNonLocalException”. I sent a number of tweets to @Outlook, but got zero responses (disappointing).

I figured I’d give it a few days, but then it was still saying the same thing. Eventually I stumbled across a post to the Microsoft Support Forums which suggested switching my Microsoft Account to use a different default profile. It sounded crazy, but I was willing to give it a try. And it worked!

The new Outlook.com now loaded in my browser in all it’s O365-like glory. Great!

I suspect the reason I might have had this problem is that I’d previously set up a real O365 account (via a free trial through being an MVP) and I’d partially configured that to use “gardiner.net.au” (without ever changing my MX records to actually deliver there). My theory is that new Outlook.com, being O365-based, probably could see that other half-set up system and got confused. As part of resolving this I also modified the settings on the O365 service to remove the “gardiner.net.au” domain settings.

I could then switch my default profile back to my @gardiner.net.au name and things continued to work.

The new Outlook.com. More responsive, and so far not prone to those import corruption issues. That’s great.

BUT

I noticed that the integration with my custom domain hosted on GMail was also reduced. Sending emails continued to work correctly – they’d use the GMail SMTP gateway that I’d configured in the Outlook.com settings. However when I went create a meeting invite, the email wasn’t sent through GMail, but directly from Outlook.com, and it was sent using one of the profile aliases (not my @gardiner.net.au address).

The migration also seemed to have messed up my email filter rules. Ok, I’ll go in and edit them then. Well looks like there’s some bugs there as this is all I get for editing the list of email addresses for a rule:

Yes, kind of hard to edit email addresses when the text box is empty. That’s just annoying.

The other downside to this whole “pulling email from GMail into Outlook.com” is that it uses polling – so there’s often a delay of a few minutes, up to maybe 30 minutes between polls from Outlook.com back to GMail checking for new emails.

So now I’m thinking that I might move back to using GMail directly (whilst keeping an eye on phone data usage).

Sometimes an “extra layer of abstraction” doesn’t help so much.

The Email dilemma

2012-12-17T08:00:00.000+10:30

Following on from my investigations into services that summarise DMARC reports, I've come to the conclusion that the reason for the warnings about email from hotmail.com is because even though the account on hotmail is configured to send as @gardiner.net.au, it still is sending the email officially using the @hotmail.com sender address.

While it passes the SPF rule (that permits the hotmail email servers to send @gardiner.net.au emails), this explains why DMARC warns that the email is "unaligned" – eg. the email says it's from @hotmail.com instead of @gardiner.net.au.

The problem is that while Hotmail does support adding additional email accounts, it only lets you configure ability to pull emails (via POP3) – you can't enter a SMTP server to send emails. Sent emails always go out via the Hotmail SMTP servers.

One solution might be to migrate the Hotmail user over to GMail and configure GMail to pull their @hotmail.com email instead (and unlike Hotmail, GMail can be configured to use a different SMTP server for addtional email accounts).

But just as I was considering this option, I came across the news that Google is discontinuing support for Exchange ActiveSync! Why does this matter? Well as a Windows Phone user this has the potential to be a show stopper. ActiveSync is the protocol used to sync my GMail, Contacts and Calendar between my phone and Google. Whilst it does say that existing configured devices will continue to function, too bad if I change phones in the future.

So another option might be to switch my domain's email over to Hotmail instead of staying with GMail, unless Microsoft can release updates for Windows Phone that restore compatibility with GMail after January 31st.

DMARC and SPF updates

2012-12-12T19:08:00.001+10:30

A while back I added a DMARC entry in DNS for my @gardiner.net.au domain. The existence of this entry then means I get daily email reports which include data from a number of email servers (eg. Google, Yahoo) about emails received from my domain and whether they were regarded as legitimate or spam. I don't receive copies of the emails themselves – just a summary of how many emails the destination site thought were legitimate and how many were rejected because they thought they were spam.

Microsoft have just announced that they too are now sending DMARC reports, so this prompted me to review my current SPF and DMARC settings to ensure that they're working properly.

The trouble with the DMARC reports are that they come via email with an attached zipped .XML file, which means you can't just view them... you have to download them, unzip them, then open it in IE (or Notepad), and scan through the XML to try and make sense of it. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a tool or service that summarised this for you?

Well it turns out there are some. I've decided try try two out - http://dmarcian.com and DMARC Analyzer.

Both of these services allow you to upload existing DMARC reports or set up email forwarding to automatically send the reports directly. You can then log in and view a summary.

I uploaded the data from the last 7 days. Here's some examples of the kind of report you get from each service:

dmarcian.com

The details for data from the 9th of December:

GARDINER.NET.AU - 3 msgs, 3 IPs
SPF-Authorized Servers - 2 groups , 2 msgs, 2 IPs, 100% auth'd
Other Servers - 1 group , 1 msg, 1 IP, 0% auth'd
65.54.190.25 (bay0-omc1-s14.bay0.hotmail.com), 1 msg, 0% auth'd
- 1 msg, disposition: None (monitor only) [none], DMARC-DKIM: fail (raw: none, d=none), DMARC-SPF: fail (raw: pass, dom: hotmail.com)

DMARC Analyzer

I was curious that both of them flagged a potential problem with an email. Sometimes this can be because it is actually spam – an email sent from an address that was not part of the authorised sender list as defined in the SPF record. But in this case, the error indicated that the email did come from a legitimate source.

Next step to confirm that my SPF record is correct. A quick trip to the SPF Record Testing Tools confirmed that yes, my SPF record was in effect, but that there was also an error message I hadn't noticed previously:

PermError SPF Permanent Error: Too many DNS lookups

So it turns out that there are limits on how many DNS lookups are allowed for SPF records. 10 to be precise.

My old SFP record was:

v=spf1 a mx ip4:203.59.1.0/24 include:aspmx.googlemail.com include:hotmail.com include:gmail.com include:live.com -all

It does looks like there's some redundancy there with two similar includes covering GMail and another two for Hotmail/Live. Simplifying things down (and hopefully not losing any accuracy) I've changed the record to this:

v=spf1 a mx ip4:203.59.1.0/24 include:hotmail.com include:_spf.google.com ~all

This now passes validation. Note that I've reverted back to ~all (a 'Soft' fail which means that recipients won't outright reject emails if there is a problem with the new rule). I'll switch back to -all (a 'hard' fail) after a week or two once I'm happy that nothing is broken!

I'll also be interested to see if the DMARC reports contain passing results for the hotmail emails.

Google App account migration

2010-08-15T19:58:00.001+09:30

I received an email from Google a few weeks ago informing me that soon the @gardiner.net.au accounts hosted in Google Apps will be able to access virtually all of the suite of regular Google Applications (eg. Blogger, Reader etc). About time!

"Google Apps" is the name of Google's hosted app service for a specific domain – not to be confused with Google Applications which you can access with just a regular Google account.

Up until now, Google Apps users were limited to a small subset (Mail, Calendar, Docs, Chat and Sites). This also meant if you wanted to access non-App applications, you had to have a separate Google account, though it could have the same name as your Google app account.

This change is a good thing in that now the one account will be used to log in to both the App services as well as the other applications.

If you have a Google account with the same name as your Google Apps account, the non-Apps account will be renamed so that it is now unique. Any services/applications that were attached to the non-App account will remain with with that account.

So while all the services that I used to access with my old Google account are still there, they are now attached to the renamed account instead.

One thing that is helpful in the interim is Google have recently added the ability to switch between multiple accounts (Windows Live IDs have had this for some time), however I'd prefer to have all my services under the same account. Unfortunately there is no automated migration path to transition application settings between accounts.

The only solution is to manually move settings over. eg. For Reader, export my feeds to an OPML file then import them (which is fine for feeds but doesn't migrate your "shared items" nor the "people you follow"). For other services like Blogger, Google Groups and Google Code, you need to re-register with the new account.

All this is a pain for me, but the other tricky part is that I'm not the only person using my domain. Google does tell me that there are other family members who are in a similar situation but for privacy reasons they won't tell me exactly who or what those users are. I'll have to wait for them to contact me so I can help them out. At least my domain just has a few users – this is going to be a much larger job for enterprise customers!

ASP.NET web host suggestions?

2010-06-17T23:12:00.001+09:30

I'm wanting to change the hosting provider that I use to host the Australian Carnivorous Plant Society's website. I've been with with SeekDotNet since 2006, but would like some more modern features and the ability to pay using the society's PayPal account (instead of using my own personal credit card for which I then need to get reimbursed :-( )

I'm currently paying $US8.75/month for:

ASP.NET 3.5
IIS 6
1.5 GB disk (only using 70MB!)
SQL 2005 (100 MB max)
30GB bandwidth

I would like to pay using PayPal for roughly the same price and have:

ASP.NET 4
IIS 7/7.5
At least 1GB disk space
SQL 2008/2008 R2 (at least 100 MB!)

Any suggestions?

Goodbye Domain Central, Hello GoDaddy

2008-10-31T12:46:00.001+10:30

The domain I registered for our band SevenFold is up for renewal in a couple of weeks. I’d received a few reminder emails from Domain Central and as it was getting close I decided today to get around to paying the money.

First stop, I went to their website, but was surprised to see that their online price was now $AU17.95 for .com domains. That’s a fair bit more than the $AU12.50 they’d listed on the tax invoice they mailed me.

Not wanting to pay more than I had to, I then rang them up and tried to pay over the phone. All was fine until they repeated the amount – “Hang on, my bill here says $12.50!”.

“Sorry, our costs have increased so we increased our prices just over a week ago”.

So they refused to let me pay the tax invoice they sent to me, and insisted that it was a “mistake” – even though the invoice wasn’t due until 1st November (and today is the 31st October).

I rang the Office of Consumer and Business Affairs and they confirmed that I should be able to pay the bill I had received for the amounted printed on the bill.

Figuring that I’m not likely to have any more success ringing Domain Central back, I’ve decided instead to take my business elsewhere.

Hotmail rejecting forwarded email

2008-05-06T20:57:00.001+09:30

I've been using ZoneEdit to manage the DNS for our domain gardiner.net.au with reasonable success. About the only problem I've had is every few months, I'd discover that email sent to my wife's Hotmail account (via her @gardiner.net.au address) is rejected with a message like the following:

xxxxxxx@hotmail.com (expanded from yyyyyyy@gardiner.net.au): host mx4.hotmail.com[65.54.244.232] said: 550 SC-001 Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons.

Reasons for rejection may be related to content with spam-like characteristics or IP/domain reputation problems. If you are not an email/network admin please contact your E-mail/Internet Service Provider for help. Email/network admins, please visit http://postmaster.live.com for email delivery information and support (in reply to MAIL FROM command)

To their credit, the Live Hotmail guys are pretty quick off the mark to resolve this once you submit a request via their support page.

I think the problem is that because ZoneEdit hosts so many domains, some of those turn out to be used (or hijacked) by spammers, and so inevitably their IP ranges end up on spam black lists. ZoneEdit don't have any SPF records for their mail servers either which probably doesn't help.

So tonight I bit the bullet, and signed up with Google Apps to manage the mail for our domain. I'm hoping that pointing my MX records to Google will mean that things all look legitimate when Hotmail goes to verify that the domains match up with the SPF record.

Signing up was pretty straight forward. After verifying that I control the DNS records, I added accounts for all the people who have @gardiner.net.au email addresses, then logged in and configured their email to forward to their preferred address. There's even a 'test' email address so you can try things out before you update all the MX record information.

We'll see if this turns out to be a good idea or not.