Celestial provides a wide variety of e-mail systems and support, and has been providing connectivity in the Seattle area since 1985 when we provided dialup uucp connections for many individuals and businesses in the Seattle and Puget Sound area.

Currently we provide a full range of e-mail services from providing individual mailboxes to turnkey systems for ISPs hosting thousands of e-mail accounts.

E-Mail Servers

Celestial has a full line of e-mail servers available that the client can purchase for in-house use. These range from systems suitable for small offices to regional ISPs with thousands of customers. These systems provide a full range of mail services including anti-virus, anti-spam, POP and IMAP, webmail, and support for most mail clients.

These systems are:

Secure

The mail servers run on Linux or FreeBSD with extensive security checking, automated backups, and on-line monitoriing. These systems are not vulnerable to the many viruses and worms that are common on common virus-ridden systems. Linux and other Unix based systems have been designed from the ground up to operate in hostile network environments, and have had very few security vulnerabilities over the years.

Filtering

These systems have extensive anti-spam and virus scanning capabilities, and can put messages that may contain virus laden attachments or spam in separate, clearly marked folders (e.g. QUARANTINE and SPAM).

Defanging

Attachments that may be automatically executed by Windows can be ``defanged'', changing the names so that they won't be automatically extracted and executed. This allows the recipient to handle useful attachments while minimizing the risks of worms or false positives causing lost files.

Flexible

Read e-mail with any IMAP capable client from MS Windows, Apple Macs, Linux, or our secure webmail interface from any browser on the Internet.

Economical

There are no per-seat or CALs (Client Access Licenses) required. The number of users is limited only by disk capacity. Capacity can be expanded by adding servers to the system without replacing existing hardware.

Scalable

Expand capabilities by adding multiple servers, any of which can send and receive e-mail as well as provide POP and IMAP services using shared mailboxes stored on network-attached stroage, storage area networks, Apple X-raid, etc. This also allows us to update or replace mail systems without any service interruption.

Stable

our systems typically have uptimes limited by hardware moves or power failures.

Support

Celestial monitors the daily maintenance and security processing via e-mail reports, and can do most software maintenance and updates using secure shell connections over the Internet.

Individual E-Mail Accounts.

Celestial provides individual e-mail accounts, hosted on our servers, and accessible via POP or IMAP directly from the client's machines as well as secure webmail access.

E-Mail Forwarding including anti-virus and spam filtering

Celestial can provide filtering for customer's servers by configuring our server(s) as primary Mail eXchange (MX) forwarders for their domains, forwarding the filtered mail to their servers appropriately marked if the messages contain worms that can attack the Microsoft Virus, Windows, or look like spam.

Mail can be forwarded via the normal SMTP channels, or by dialup uucp (Unix-Unix Copy Program) for clients that don't have direct Internet connections.

Webmail Systems and Access.

Celestial's e-mail systems offer a very flexible webmail interface using horde and imp over secure https connections. We can also provide access to customer's POP and IMAP servers through our own WebMail Server.

Mailing Lists

Celestial hosts several mailing lists including:

• filepro-list FilePro Developers (and many off-topic discussions, usually on the history of *nix operating systems).
• Seattle Unix Group
  • slug-board List for communications with the group's Board of Directors
  • slug-list Meeting notices and other announcements
  • slug-jobs Job opportunities.
• Geeks with Guns General discussion for shooters.

We also are hosting some lists on the old Majordomo mailing list manager that need to be moved to Mailman, and don't have a publically available web interface.