Dreamhost

I really hate complaining about Dreamhost, I know it may seem like I enjoy it, but I really don't.

This is probably no surprise to some of you.  But remember the custom .procmail setups I wrote about a few months back.  To catch you up, no one can create a mail user with shell access on Dreamhost anymore.  This means that custom .procmail setups cannot be done anymore.(There may be a work around to this, but it has not been accomplished yet)  Dreamhost previously told us that anyone who had an email address with shell access would be grandfathered in and would be able to keep it.

Well not anymore.  I have received warnings from other Dreamhost users that once your account is "upgraded" in the upcoming migration process, you will lose all custom .procmail setups and all mail accounts will lose their shell access.  All of this has happened with NO WARNING for a number of users.

This means you may wake up in the morning and find that your custom filtering no longer works.  More and more it looks like Dreamhost no longer wants to host email.

The semi good news is that after a year of service I can now report on the uptime provided by Dreamhost.  In the end I received 99.886% uptime.  Which sounds good at first, but in the end this amounts to over 10 hours of downtime.  Nearly half a day!  Luckily, I really only rely on Dreamhost for email, however with their recent suggestion that Dreamhost will no longer offer email, I am a little uneasy about continuing with them.

But, I have a few months of free service creditted to me for all the crap I have put up with.  So I will be researching other hosting options over the next few months.

Full breakdown of the downtime is available after the jump.

After that post, a firestorm among clients ensued with over 100 comments.  And it seems like they may have taken a few steps back and reconsidered their position.  A later comment by Dallas seems to suggest that Dreamhost is trying to quickly remedy the absence of procmail. 

Sidenote

As a side note, we seem to have been given a slight glimpse into the balance of personalities at the core of Dreamhost.  Josh has always been the more vocal of the two.  But, Josh has also been very unprofessional at times.  In this most recent post, it seems likely that while Josh may be more vocal, Dallas is the professional face of Dreamhost and the person truley in charge. 

How to get procmail Back

Back to the point of this article, after reading the most recent entry I realized that it is possible to still use both procmail and spamassassin.  However, this solution is not elegant.

You can no longer create a shell account with a custom SpamAssassin install on Dreamhost anymore.

Why am I so upset about this? Because this was one of my main reasons for using Dreamhost. A custom install of SpamAssassin(SA) allows me to use custom rulesets, ClamAssassin(Virus Checker), DCC, pyzor, Razor, and much more. Without a custom install I am left with the default Junk Mail filterig provided by Dreamhost. This Junk Mail filter is based on an UNCUSTOMIZABLE install of a very old version of SA. The end result is a poor Spam Filter.

And honestly a poor Spam Filter is basically worthless.

1. Dreamhost Advertised a Custom SpamAssassin Install when I Puchased my one year Contract.

Yup, in fact they still promiss it on their Hosting Features page. They also provided instructions and support for how to use it here, here, and here. Additionally, they have provided continual service for this over the years. You will note that each of those pages contains a warning that this feature is no longer available. I had to fight to get that warning admitted to the wiki, more on that later.

At no point did Dreamhost ever say that procmail support may be deleted at anytime. Nor did they give any indication that procmail support would be revoked at any point in time.