Hi. I ran my own for years but gave up on it for many of the same reasons others have echoed. spam filtering, rdns records when I was running things out of home even with static ips, constant up time etc. I haven't used exchange in a long time. When I did, the server itself I found fairly difficult to admin but this was a long time ago and I suspect it has gotten much better. When I ran one for work, it was running on an nt4 server which gives an indication of the time frame and log files used to fill up the disk etc. I actually didn't know one could get exchange with 365. I will have to investigate as this might be a useful alternative to imap things for some people. Don't need to do this stuff for work anymore as the ONtario government has a whole team for their exchange servers but still like to keep my hand in. Shall do some digging. Brian. Contact me on skype: brian.moore follow me on twitter: http://www.twitter.com/bmoore123 On 07/29/2015 7:10 AM, Andrew Hodgson wrote:
Hi,
I agree with everything you said. I used Simply Mail Solutions, then migrated everything to Office 365. I didn't have a bad experience with SMS, but just thought it would be better to have Exchange hosting with Microsoft then a third party company. I have 3 main email accounts now including my work email account which is for a large retailer in the UK, and they are all on Office 365.
Of course I still run my own mail system for this list and some other automated mail submission stuff, but for my own user mailbox I used Exchange back in 2004 when I was training myself, and I would never use anything different now.
Andrew.
________________________________________ From: Blind-sysadmins [blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] on behalf of Darragh Ó Héiligh [d@digitaldarragh.com] Sent: 29 July 2015 10:34 To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Email Servers
Just to emphasize something that Andrew said:
Why do you need a mail server? There are a lot of free, cheap and professional mail providers out there at the moment.
I hosted my own mail servers for about ten years but I stopped about two years ago because it's a lot more hassle than it's worth.
I've even started moving my customers over to cloud hosted solutions.
I've been bitten a few times by cloud providers of course. I would no longer trust Simply Mail Solutions to hold a stone. Never mind my customers mail boxes for example. I've had good experiences with Google apps but I don't like POP or IMAP. My preferred option funnily enough at the moment is Office 365. There's just no beating it for price, reliability and even accessibility.
I stay away from POP and IMAP in favour of Exchange and active sync. If you can't get mail in real time to a phone at the moment you may forget about it. Customers aren't interested. They don't want pull functionality. They want push. If they can get instant gratification from Facebook they expect it from their mail system as well.
The biggest two draw backs of running your own mail server are:
1. Constant up time is needed. If your MX records are pointing to that server it needs to be up every day all year round. If you have two boxes and their load balanced then fantastic but you have more patching and more maintenance.
2. Anti-Spam. Spam is one of the biggest problems for a mail administrator. White list too much and it becomes unuseful. Don't and people moan because they had to click three times instead of once to release and open a message. Again, this requires patching and maintenance.
I'm still running three on site mail systems at the moment. All three have front end servers thanks to the EFA project. All three are Exchange servers. Correction. I'm running a fourth which is Postfix and Squirrelmail based.
I'm looking forward to their renewal dates because I'll be glad to get rid of them.
I'm tired of tracing through log files looking for a message that someone said hasn't been delivered when I know full well that it's on the recipients side that something has gone wrong.
So keep that in mind. You're not just setting up a mail server. Your taking on the administration of that server, people's mail clients, the anti-spam, anti-virus and message delivery to companies that you have no control over.
It's great fun!
Sorry for the lengthy response.
Darragh
-----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Hodgson Sent: 29 July 2015 08:46 To: Blind sysadmins list <blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org> Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Email Servers
Hi,
There are a few specific paths you could go down. Here are some ideas:
You could go with a more enterprise ready system and just use the free version. Something like Zimbra or the like have free versions which support basic POP3 and IMAP access, as well as a good webmail client. There is an install curve to get through but once you are there it provides a good backend web interface to configure the system. The packages tend to take over the system, so you couldn't use the server for anything else really.
You could just install your own packages from the Linux repository including for example Postfix/Exim, Courier, Squirrelmail, and perhaps a configuration tool like Webmin etc. This will involve initial configuration but will be a good learning experience.
You could use something like ISPConfig, Symbiosis or CPannel on the server to provide the email server functionality
Last but not least there are cheap email providers around that could also do this for you and then you wouldn't have a server to worry about maintaining.
Hope this helps. Andrew. .________________________________________ From: Blind-sysadmins [blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] on behalf of Jad Wauthier [jtwauthier@gmail.com] Sent: 28 July 2015 22:48 To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] Email Servers
What email server would you install on a Linux system for a client? I'm looking for something that has a nice webmail interface and is easily configured on the back-end. I'm a bit bummed that Google Apps isn't free anymore.
-- Jad Wauthier | Problem Solver Phone: 512.290.3494 Fax: 512.367.5925 It's all in the perception.
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