After a good couple of days of research, I’ve decided to take a chance on vortexhost.com. Unfortunately, I could not find any feedback on the webhost-reviewing sites about them, which doesn’t help put my mind at ease. But in the end, the really good comments I’ve read in vortexhost.com’s forums, combined with the really quick and professional replies to the e-mails I’ve sent Justin Reel (the admin of vortexhost) won me over to at least give them a try. They offer a 14-day money-back period, so here’s to hoping that I won’t need to see if I can get my money back.

This is the first time that I’ve ever wanted to leave my e-mail on my webhost. Previous to now, I’ve always used fetchmail to POP my e-mail off of the webhost to a machine on my home LAN, and then a combination of procmail for filtering, bogofilter for spam filtering, and courier-IMAP to store my e-mail on my home machine and be able to retrieve it via IMAP. Though the weakest link in this chain is the constantly-changing and semi-flaky Verizon DSL connection, this has worked pretty well for me for the last several years. The problem is that when this breaks (and it does, periodically), I am completely without e-mail. Which is why I want to start keeping my e-mail on my webhost, thinking that I should never go without e-mail this way.

The problems/differences that I’ve hit thus far:

– cPanel’s IMAP uses mbox instead of Maildir format for storing e-mail. I’ve had problems in the past with mbox corruption, and do NOT want to deal with this again. This is my biggest concern, actually. I am most tempted to change hosts (after < 1 day with my new host) and find a host that will use Maildir format for storing my e-mail. I've read that Plesk stores e-mail in Maildir format. You can look forward to seeing quite the rant here if for some reason, I lose e-mail because of cPanel/IMAP/mbox, I guarantee you that. - SpamAssassin is the defacto standard used on cPanel-based sites nowadays. I'm a little leary of relying on it, as I've read that bogofilter is more efficient and has a better algorithm for dealing with spam. I've also had very good success with bogofilter for the last couple of years, and am a little hesitant to have to go through the learning process (pun intended) again. I've gotten bogofilter trained/seasoned very well by now.... So, what I cannot find information on is how you can train spamassassin on a webhost that uses cPanel. It can't be that hard.... I had previously been using bogofilter on my home machine combined with procmail to check for spam. I had 2 folders set up for training bogofilter... one for Spam and one for Ham. I had a cron job that ran every couple of hours that went through these 2 folders and trained bogofilter as to what Spam it had missed or what Ham it had mistakenly identified as Spam. It worked. =:) I need to be able to train SpamAssassin when it makes a mistake. Does anyone know how I can do this? I don't see anything built into cPanel that allows me to do this, nor do I see anything built into any of the webmail front-ends. Is there a "provided" or approved way to do this in a hosted site? Or do I need to create my own solution by using a similar approach to what I did before, with separate mailboxes and cron jobs?