Postfix: The Heart of Our Message Transport

At DreamHost, the journey of every email begins with Postfix, our powerful Mail Transfer Agent (MTA). Postfix takes on the critical role of ensuring your email reliably reaches the right inbox, handling everything from accepting outgoing messages to securely routing them across networks. We’ve chosen Postfix for its versatility, robust security features, and ability to manage massive email traffic — and when we say massive, we mean millions of messages sent and received every day. It’s the hardworking engine that keeps your email running smoothly.

Dovecot: Providing Seamless Access with IMAP and POP3

Once your email reaches its destination, you need a way to access it — and that’s where Dovecot steps in. As our IMAP and POP3 server, Dovecot ensures you can connect to your inbox anytime, from any device. IMAP keeps your email seamlessly synchronized across all your devices — so if you read a message on your phone, it’ll show as read on your desktop too. Prefer to download emails straight to your device? POP3 has you covered. With its reputation for top-notch performance and security, Dovecot is the perfect match for DreamHost, helping us manage email for millions of users every day.

MailChannels: Keeping Our Network Clean

Managing millions of email accounts means tackling the challenge of filtering out spam, phishing attempts, and other malicious threats — and that’s where MailChannels comes in. This specialized service works hard on both inbound and outbound filtering, keeping your inbox safe and ensuring our servers remain secure. On the outbound side, MailChannels helps prevent compromised accounts from sending spam, protecting our reputation and avoiding blacklisting. For inbound email, it gives our users peace of mind by blocking harmful content before it ever reaches their inboxes. With its sophisticated analysis, MailChannels ensures legitimate messages get through while keeping the bad stuff out.

NetApp Storage: Reliable and Scalable Email Storage

Behind the scenes of DreamHost’s email infrastructure is a robust storage system that keeps millions of mailboxes running smoothly. We rely on NetApp storage devices for their unmatched scalability and redundancy, which are essential for managing the huge volume of email data our users create every day. This reliable solution ensures your emails stay safe and secure, with built-in replication to protect against data loss, even if hardware fails. Plus, NetApp’s flexible architecture lets us scale effortlessly as our user base grows, so you can count on uninterrupted service no matter what.

Roundcube: Modern, Easy Webmail Access

If you prefer managing your email right from your browser, we’ve got you covered with Roundcube, an open-source webmail client. Roundcube combines a sleek, modern design with features like drag-and-drop functionality, advanced search, and an easy-to-navigate interface, making email management a breeze. It brings the familiarity of a desktop email experience straight to the web, so you can stay connected wherever you are — no extra apps required.

Scaling for Millions: The DreamHost Difference

What truly sets DreamHost apart isn’t just the powerful tools we rely on — it’s the scale at which we make them work. Managing email for millions of users is no small feat, and every part of our stack — from Postfix and Dovecot to MailChannels, NetApp storage, and Roundcube — has to perform seamlessly, day in and day out. With millions of emails moving through our systems daily, we prioritize uptime, security, and speed above all else. Thanks to our dedicated team of engineers who constantly monitor, maintain, and refine this ecosystem, we’re able to deliver an email experience you can count on.

Whether it’s ensuring email deliverability with Postfix, providing secure and seamless access with Dovecot, keeping unwanted messages out with MailChannels, storing massive volumes of mail data with NetApp, or offering a sleek user experience with Roundcube, DreamHost’s email stack is designed to make sure our users like you stay connected without a hitch.

Conclusion

Delivering reliable email service is about more than just sending messages — it’s about connecting people in a way that is secure, efficient, and reliable. At DreamHost, we take pride in the technology and expertise that power our email platform. It’s an intricate balance of open-source software, specialized filtering, high-performance storage, and user-friendly interfaces, all working in harmony to ensure that millions of people can send and receive messages effortlessly every day.

We love taking care of the complexities so our customers can focus on what matters — communicating with their world. If you’re interested in more behind-the-scenes technical deep dives, let us know — we’re always excited to share how DreamHost makes the magic happen!
For more information about our email hosting and to sign up, visit https://www.dreamhost.com/products/email/.

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Your website’s performance is critical to online success. That’s why I’m excited to announce that all new and existing DreamPress Pro websites will receive object caching at no additional cost!

Object Caching, Powered by Redis

Object caching is a powerful feature that significantly improves the performance of your WordPress website by storing the results of database queries in your server’s memory. This allows your website to quickly retrieve this information instead of having to query the database every time a user visits your website. The end result is faster load times and a smoother browsing experience for your visitors.

With the addition of object caching as a standard feature of our DreamPress Pro plans, you’ll notice the inclusion of the Redis Object Cache plugin in the WordPress admin dashboard. This provides the integration with the backend object cache system powered by Redis. Our team has taken care of the complex backend integration, allowing you to enjoy the benefits of this feature without any additional hassle, configuration, or cost.

The beating heart of WordPress is its database and everything depends on it. The website content, categories and taxonomies, settings for themes and plugins, and more are all stored in this database. Each time someone visits an uncached page, WordPress must query the database for this information. Object caching keeps those results in memory making WordPress more responsive.

Sites That Will Benefit Most from Object Caching

While all WordPress sites use a database and will benefit from object caching, some are particularly database-intensive and see significant performance improvements. Our testing demonstrated the following sites are well-suited for the benefits of object caching:

• E-commerce sites: Object caching can help improve the performance of e-commerce sites by storing frequently accessed data, such as product information, user sessions, and shopping carts.
• Membership sites: Sites that require users to log in and access restricted content can benefit from object caching by storing user sessions in memory and reducing the number of database queries required.
• News or blog sites: Sites with high traffic and frequent content updates can benefit from object caching by storing frequently accessed content, such as the latest articles or most popular posts.

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DreamHost’s Product team analyzed tens of thousands of server statistics from a wide variety of customer websites. The findings directly contributed to the optimized settings for new and existing customers. As a result of the changes that were made, the team increased the amount of memory dedicated to PHP OPcache, a key performance-enhancing feature. Excitement ran high when testing showed decreased website loading times across the board!

About OPcache

There are many different techniques when it comes to website caching. The most well-known is browser caching. The browser caches files locally on the user’s disk so it doesn’t have to be retrieved over the internet again. There are also server-side caches including page cache and opcode cache. Page caching stores a rendered page in the server’s memory or disk for faster serving later. Opcode caches, like PHP OPcache, improve performance of PHP code by keeping compiled code in memory.

OPcache is a powerful tool that boosts PHP performance by storing precompiled code in memory. Without OPcache, every request to your website has to compile the necessary PHP code. By using precompiled code in memory, websites load faster and are more responsive. That’s particularly beneficial for content-heavy and dynamic websites by enhancing efficiency and performance.

The use of OPcache also improves the scalability of your website. By serving web pages faster, the server can handle more requests. This gives you the ability to handle higher traffic volumes more effectively with fewer resources and more stability.

A Faster Website, Done For You

Best of all, these enhancements have been implemented server-side, meaning you don’t need to make any changes or updates to your websites. The improvements are already in effect, and you should begin noticing a difference right away!

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We’ve made a lot of progress but still have a ways to go!

Our current project is to migrate our spam filtering service to a new provider for incoming messages. Unfortunately, we’re discovering that it tends to be overly aggressive and sends some messages to your spam folder that clearly don’t belong there. Spam blocking is a bit of an art form that requires careful attention to get the balance just right, and we’re working on that balance to get acceptable results. Our new provider is working closely with us to solve the problem and prioritize development efforts that will improve incoming mail filtering at DreamHost.

One method we’re using to resolve the problem is to train the spam filtering algorithm in bulk. Some customers have written to our tech support team for help and have been asked to provide examples of messages that have been mis-filtered. Thank you to everyone who has done so; these messages have been extremely helpful in training the filtering algorithm quickly.

As we monitor the reports of incorrectly filtered messages, we’ll also be safelisting known good senders at the DreamHost level. While training the filtering algorithm can take some time, these changes will have immediate effects. We are adding well-known domains to our global safelist when they have a valid DMARC configuration. This is a manual process and is similar to the allow and blocklist settings you have in the control panel and mailboxes interface. We’re also working to improve the interface in our customer control panel to make this even easier going forward.

We have seen progress in the functionality of our spam filters over the last two weeks. We’ve seen fewer legitimate emails getting caught by the spam filter, and customer complaints are trending downward. Our spam filtering partner has further updates planned to improve its capabilities, and we are continuing our manual safelisting process. We hope to meet your expectations (and our own) very soon.

Enhancements So Far

One of the first improvements we made was to completely refresh the hardware we use for email service. Our previous generation of email hardware had reached the end of its practical life, and it struggled to keep up with the growth in email users and the amount of storage they consumed. The new hardware is faster, easier to maintain, and highly scalable. This has brought improvements to our email service speed and stability along with fewer errors for customers in their email clients.

Next, we took on the challenge of rejected customer emails due to our email servers appearing on blocklists. The unfortunate fact is that spammers are relentless and will use every method at their disposal — legal or not — to send their junk messages. That includes breaking into our customers’ email accounts and using them to send spam. The activity on these compromised accounts leads to our mail servers being placed on blocklists and, unfortunately, legitimate emails are often blocked as a result.

We implemented a third-party service to filter outgoing emails and reject sending fraudulent messages or spam. We immediately saw our email servers’ reputation improve, and their appearance on email blocklists is now a thing of the past.

Earlier this year, we changed our webmail system to use the popular open-source software, Roundcube. While this may appear to be a simple software change, there was a lot of work to migrate existing data from the old webmail system to Roundcube. We also took the opportunity to modernize the infrastructure and deployment process behind the scenes making it easier to operate going forward. When all was said and done, we had gained a more performant webmail system with a beautiful and responsive design.

Future Plans

We have several more projects we want to complete to further stabilize and improve the reliability of our email service. The next project will be a change invisible to email users. We will be updating the architecture of our email back end so that it is more manageable and fault-tolerant. This isn’t an exciting project from a “cool new features” perspective, but it will result in less downtime and errors for the service.

Looking further ahead, we plan to improve the deliverability of messages sent from our hosting machines and customer email forwarded outside of our service. These services are also affected by compromised accounts, blocklists, and spammers. Our aim is to ensure those legitimate messages are delivered to their final recipients.

We have lots of ideas to further improve the email experience once we get past these crucial initial projects. To name a few, we want to improve the email user experience in our control, provide better options for spam handling instead of simply moving it to the spam folder, and provide better integration of features in webmail.

The list may be long, but we are excited to build it!

We appreciate your patience while we work to continually improve our email offering at DreamHost. Please don’t ever hesitate to contact us to share your thoughts about email — we truly value your feedback.

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