Frog's Technical Page

3rd Parties


General Guidelines

The relevant factors for using a 3rd party or doing the job by oneself are reliability and cost.
Sure, fun matters, but it should not....
Because there are plenty of companies who provide free or cut-cost services, it is all about reliability and its components:
---is their hardware more robust than mine? (non-stop grade, redundant clusters, backups / public grade wintel?
---is their software delivering?
---is their staff more numerous than mine (24 hours attendance / a single person with a family and a mortgage?)
---is their staff skilled enough for the hardware/software they operate?
---are they going to last or get bust or change policies or kick me out?
---can I find a quick and transparent substitute if they fail?
---....
Those questions are not simple and the best 3rd party can get killed by its very success, or by hackers looking for a fashionable victim.
Also, some 3rd parties take advantage of a monopolistic or commercial edge, but they don't deliver according to their promises.
For all that, you need some testing and fine-tuning: tests satisfactory with a few hundreds messages may bump later into quota problems, and so on.
Backup solutions are welcome too...


POP servers / Direct delivery

You may find plenty of POP servers, for free or low cost.
Relevant factors to choose a box will be size, speed and uptime.
Users and other remailers will fill your box, and if you can't empty it fast enough (because you are slow or the link is slow or they are slow, or you stopped your computer for maintenance, or you are offline), it will get full and mail might get lost.
(of course, *most* remailers will recycle the bounces to try sending again, but most end-users won't.
Uptime would be less of a problem, because the 'Unreachable' error message triggers a retry, while 'Box_Full' triggers direct bounce.
I suggest you get a box and try to fill it to death, and then try to empty it, see how things go. You may also look at the figures for various remailers' load to know what to expect.
Thesaurus and MarketShare
Frog's PeakLoads and Frog's Load Graphical Database
I found boxes under 20Mb to be unsuitable, 50Mb is better, actually I found free boxes, 1Gb+, and reasonably fast.
Be careful also that some boxes silently discard mail inbound from some domains or IP (RBL / DUL), for 'anti-spam' crusade sake.
Good shopping!
The alternative is to run your own MTA and have your mail delivered directly to your computer.
Technically, it adds another layer of software, with new security problems, but all that can be overcome.
The problem is that it is not suitable if you are not online most of the time: attempts to deliver mail to an unresponsive address creates unfair burden on to the senders, especially when they are fellow remops running their own end-to-end MTAs.
It is also more CPU-intensive.


Forwarders (BigFoot)

Your remailer's address is part of its PGP key (same for Mix).
People use the remailer's nick: 'Frog', 'Efga', 'Dizum', but actually it is the mail address which matters: it is hard-buried in your nyms, in the stats, in the keyrings, all over the place.
If you lose your address, your remailer is dead, whether you find your POP unsuitable, or your domain gets bust, or your POP provider kicks you out.
It might be a shame, but only the address in 'Primary ID' is recognized by remailers.
The ideas behind the use of a forwarder are:
---you can silently and remotely change POP behind the forwarder as you please or as you need:
-----experiment multiple POP providers for speed and volume
-----fill one box after the other if you are offline
-----dispatch load on multiple boxes to be discreet about volumes processed
-----stop worrying about quota or policy problems at your POP provider
---your POP is not under direct exposure from remailer-haters: they don't know it / you can change it.
-----actually, your POP might very well not even notice he is being used by a remailer...
---you may even use 'distribution' instead of simple 'forwarding' for greater reliability.
---all that valid only under the assumption that the forwarder is more dependable than the POP.
I have been using Bigfoot for nearly 2 years with total reliability until that RBL/DUL and then that quota policy...
In the meantime, I had changed the redirection address at least 100 times, without anybody noticing.
Sneakemail *might* qualify, but you got to check for yourself.


SMTP servers / own MTA

There are a few free SMTP servers, but generally they don't last or they are slow, or they got quotas or they are unreliable.
Generally, you SMTP is the one supplied by your ISP, and that is it.
If it does not hold the load, or is too slow or is unreliable, or blocks some destinations, or whatever, you are cooked, you just got to change ISP.
(e.g.: All of a sudden, my ISP started losing messages by thousands, and truncating bounced messages...)
The alternative is to run your own end-to-end MTA:
---you do what you want:
---but it is more CPU-intensive
---but you might get RBLed


WEB hosting / own site

There are plenty of companies offering free web hosting.
My 'dear friends' in France managed to have a few of my mirror sites shut down, for alleged TOS violations.
But it should not be too difficult to shop for a reliable and fast web hosting, and anyways changing the address of the Website is not as serious as changing the remailer's mail address.
Generally, web hosting works on specialized non-stop machines, so uptime should be better than what you can provide.
You can also run your own server.
I do (Apache), but it is more for fun. I do not mention the "home" site as primary WWW address.
And you should consider the load if you become too popular or offer huge downloads of 'other things'.


DNS redirection

If you do not have a static IP, you will need to use a DNS redirector, somebody who will signal your real IP and associate it to your DNS name.
It became very popular, with more and more people with 24/7 links and dynamic IP. There is a list of 20 at least, with ratings and all, and at least as many software clients to feed the data.
You can also have static redirection to a certain IP.
Those services are free.


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