Question regarding privacy when hosting large amounts of domains with your service.

#1

Hi,

I am looking for some affordable email hosting for my many, many sites. I don’t get a lot of emails on each one but I have a lot of domains.

Your service looks pretty great, however I have a concern over privacy.

These sites are in competitive markets where competitors will try every trick in the book to uncover my other websites, even if they only know I own one site.

I am using Cloudflare for my CDN which masks the majority of the traffic (as the cloudflare CDN services host 1000’s of sites, so while you could potentially see my sites are connected to the same IPs, it’s not so much of an issue as it is mixed in with thousands of other unrelated sites).

I also protect my domain privacy, so no issues with WHOIS.

However, some malicious individuals were able to identify the other websites I host (with Cloudflare as CDN) by analysing the mail server I use. Cloudflare does not support mail ports so the mail DNS records expose the IP of my server (which hosts all my sites, on cPanel). This can then be used to see all my sites.

If I use your service for mail and change the DNS records, will people be able to see my other sites and connect them, or is it like Cloudflare where thousands of accounts are hosted on the same IP/Servers, somewhat masking the relationship between sites?

Thank you for your help, and I appreciate this is an affordable service, so no rush on the replies but I appreciate someone with the correct knowledge getting back to me as soon as is possible.

Thank you!

#2

Great question!

No matter what you’ll have to point your MX to us and you can’t mask it with a CloudFlare proxy because CloudFlare doesn’t pass SMTP traffic. Any type of proxy you might build to do something like it for SMTP would then break SPF. The only privacy you’d be counting on if they’re looking at everyone who points their MX records to the server you’re on of ours would simply be that you’re in a giant pool, and one can’t really “prove” that any of the domains also pointed to the same server are owned by the same person, at least not by that detail alone.

#5

Fantastic, thank you again @Jarland

I am buying a package now - it is asking for a domain. Is this required as I will be setting up multiple domains? WIll this be a main domain or will it be in the same “class” as the other domains I add? (So I can just add a random domain from my list?)

#7

Perfect, thanks again!

#3

Great, thanks for your quick and detailed response! Much appreciated.

Just to be clear and confirm, you are saying that I would indeed be in a giant pool of sites if I used your service? Any idea with a rough number of sites I’d be in with?

#6

The back-end software requires a domain to create an account. You can’t delete that domain, but you can rename it to another later if desired, so probably just input one of the domains you intend to use.

#4

You’d be provisioned on either longhorn.mxrouting.net or arrow.mxrouting.net. There are currently 735 domains with MX records pointing to Longhorn, and 1,161 domains with MX records pointing to Arrow.