Hosting my own Exchange server at home means finding a few online resources to make it all work – like a dynamic DNS service to keep my domain name pointed at my Comcast-issued IP address which changes every few days and a smarthost service that will relay mail for me since Comcast (and Charter and AT&T) block port 25 (the traditional port for sending email).
I’ve been using ChangeIP for many years with little issue, but they recently changed their email forwarding cost from $22.50/year to $87/year, causing me to shop around.
Enter dyn.com. A long time dynamic DNS and plain-old DNS host they also have email services including relay. One initial problem was no pre-sales support for small users – the only pre-sales they have is dedicated to enterprise-level customers and they are unfamiliar with products/pricing for small users.
They suggested support@dyn.com which I quickly discovered rejects any email not coming from an existing customer. Fortunately a rep offered to forward my call to support if I called her desk (apparently there is a filter on the phone line also restricting it to customers).
Dyn phone support quickly got me squared away and while their Dynamic DNS costs far more ($120/year for 4 domains vs $33/year for 4 domains with ChangeIP) their email service costs less ($19.50/yr vs $22.50 for the old pricing and $87 on the new pricing from ChangeIP).
After setting the smarthost name and credentials I noticed Dyn doesn’t use the same port so I needed:
Set-SendConnector -Identity “Outbound SMTP” -Port 2525
but voila mail is flowing!
