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