I recently implemented an email check on our servers in order to ensure consistency in email delivery. The check itself sends an email through the local SMTP instance which then passes that message off to our production mail service. Then the same machine begins running a check on a remote IMAP connection to ensure that the message arrives at it's destination mailbox within an acceptable(configurable) period of time.
The problem that inevitably rose from this was the remote IMAP service that we were using began blocking connections. First, we tried gmail or rather google apps to handle this, but I frequently received the error message "Web login required." After some research, I tried a couple of suggestions including selection the option to always use SSL through the web interface and turning off captchas for the account. This did not solve the problem. Presumably, gmail also handles rate-limiting, but does not publish the rate-limit that causes this message to be generated for an account.
I then search for a free or cheap IMAP service to use. I found fastmail.fm. They seemed to have good reviews and they publish a lot of information about their infrastructure which is always a good thing. 3 minutes into testing their service and I got a rate-limit message from them as well. There is a maximum of 100 connections to the account in 600 seconds. Clearly not a scalable solution using a single account with lots of machines.
After several days of testing this off and on, the new plan is host IMAP ourselves. As a general rule, I'd prefer to spend my time improving the hosting environment for our blogging application, but when you can't find someone willing to host the tool that you need, sometimes you end up having to roll your own.
The problem that inevitably rose from this was the remote IMAP service that we were using began blocking connections. First, we tried gmail or rather google apps to handle this, but I frequently received the error message "Web login required." After some research, I tried a couple of suggestions including selection the option to always use SSL through the web interface and turning off captchas for the account. This did not solve the problem. Presumably, gmail also handles rate-limiting, but does not publish the rate-limit that causes this message to be generated for an account.
I then search for a free or cheap IMAP service to use. I found fastmail.fm. They seemed to have good reviews and they publish a lot of information about their infrastructure which is always a good thing. 3 minutes into testing their service and I got a rate-limit message from them as well. There is a maximum of 100 connections to the account in 600 seconds. Clearly not a scalable solution using a single account with lots of machines.
After several days of testing this off and on, the new plan is host IMAP ourselves. As a general rule, I'd prefer to spend my time improving the hosting environment for our blogging application, but when you can't find someone willing to host the tool that you need, sometimes you end up having to roll your own.
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