The Los Angeles, California based company, which hosts more than 700,000 websites, is suggesting its customers use Gmail for their email instead of the DreamHost mail servers.

And although DreamHost says it is continuing to support all its existing email offerings, co-founder Josh Jones wrote in his blog post last Friday that email is not the company’s strong suit.

He writes: “Just over HALF of all the support requests we get are about email. Everything else we offer, combined, doesn’t add up to the amount of trouble, expense, use, and effort that goes into ’simple’ old email. And that’s kind of funny, because as far as I can tell, almost nobody CHOOSES a web host based on their email features…

It’s just not something people are looking for from us, and it’s something the big free email providers like Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google can do better. In fact, as you’ve maybe already seen, we recently made it very easy to use Gmail for all your email hosting with us, still at your own domain! ”

The post seems to suggest that DreamHost cannot effectively handle its customer’s email demands, and that it would be able to better focus on hosting websites than dealing with support calls concerning email issues.

Procmail is a program for filtering electronic mail and is useful for presorting and preprocessing large amounts of incoming mail. It is used to sort out mail from mailing lists, to dispose of junk mail, to send automatic replies or to run a mailing list.

It isn’t unprecedented for a hosting provider to stop offering a service it has offered in the past, especially when it is explaining to customers that it will be replacing it with its own in-house filtering mechanism and that it is grandfathering the service for existing accounts. But browsing the Dreamhost discussion board, it seems as though some customers are offended by the way Dreamhost decided to halt the service without a proper 30 to 60 day notice of a change.

One forum user shared the response he received from the hosting provider after sending in a support ticket regarding the Procmail announcement.

Dreamhost wrote: “The plan is to make the Keyword Filter section of our panel more robust so (sic) mimic many common procmail jobs. Regretfully there won’t be any direct access for users to create and maintain your own procmail. We understand that this is a bit of a step backwards as far as our long known open access, but it’s a bit of a necessary evil if we are going to proceed with a new paradigm to allow for more reliable mail.”

Dreamhost’s methods of dealing with customer issues have been both praised and criticized in the past, which explains why some customers are accepting and supportive of Dreamhost’s Procmail decision while others don’t appear to be taking as kindly to the change.

After an outage in 2005, Dreamhost published a very public and detailed account of the problems in its blog, which was met with a widespread and mostly positive response from customers. But earlier this year in January, Dreamhost was heavily criticized for the informal, and as some described it, condescending, way it dealt with an issue where the company accidentally over-billed its customers for approximately $7.5 million.

The billing occurred when a Dreamhost employee accidentally ran the company’s automatic billing system for outstanding charges as of December 31, 2008, instead of 2007, says Dreamhost’s blog.

The company has received hundreds of emails and blog comments from upset customers, including customers who are facing overdraft charges after the overcharged fees were made on their already overdrawn bank accounts.

Dreamhost has apologized profusely to customers for the billing error, both in emails and blog updates, and says it is currently working to resolve the problem. The Web host says customers need not contact their credit card company or bank concerning the billing error. However, it is recommended otherwise for those customers who are facing overdraft charges.

We had a teensy eensy weensy little billing error last night… my first clue something was up when I saw this morning’s daily billing report (so far): $7,500,000.

It turns out due to my excessively fat fingers, nearly every one of our customers has been seriously over-billed in the last 12 hours.

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The end to this story is that of course, I’m very very sorry, we’re very very sorry, and I’m sure you’re very very sorry this happened. I really am. I understand the sort of problems that an unexpected large charge to your credit card (or worse yet, your debit card) can cause. If the tone of this blog post seemed a little light, I apologize I don’t mean to offend and I realize how serious an issue this is. I’ve been up since 3:50am trying to undo the damage and maybe I’m a little shell-shocked.

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We’re going through and fixing everything right now, but it may take several hours before all affected accounts are corrected. You will receive an email when yours is fixed, and if your credit card was charged, the charge will be refunded automatically.

Source: dreamhoststatus.com and blog.dreamhost.com