My site has been up and down, on and off, stiff and flimsy throughout the week. I am not the sys admin of the year so running on my own virtual server has been a workout. My pains really started with Plesk, a control panel for hosting multiple websites. It's a great tool when it works and it can configure the few things I'm not familiar with with a few clicks. However when it doesn't work then I have to manually go in and tweak things myself. Like my DNS and Mail for example. For whatever reason my DNS settings for dennydotnet.com would not be created, maybe it dislikes my name :) Anyways...
Today I decided to finally fix my Mail problems after a friend enlightened me with knowledge of Google Apps. "Google Apps.. and Mail, huh?" Yep! You can create your email account on Google Apps, add a few DNS records to your domain and voila! Google now handles your e-mail, faster and more reliably. You also have access to your email via GMail and you can of course enable POP/IMAP to access it via your favorite mail program. Best of all you get to use your domain name "@dennydotnet.com" not the "@gmail.com" name and you have total control of email as well as "lists."
Allowing the Goog to handle my mail is great because I can now disable and uninstall my mail server software. This, in turn, gives me back more memory and hard disk space as well as less headaches when my email isn't going through :)
Thanks Goog!
[Update 05/08/08]: Everything went well with Google Apps and I went around my site and changed my email settings to reflect the new Google Apps email. At first I couldn't figure out which host or port to send to but after some research I was able to make the necessary changes. Below is an example of the SmtpClient code needed to send mail via Gmail.
[code:c#]
SmtpClient smtp = new SmtpClient();
smtp.Credentials = new NetworkCredential( "addr@mydomain.com", "****************" );
smtp.Host = "smtp.gmail.com";
smtp.Port = 587;
smtp.EnableSsl = true;
[/code]