Mail server advantages

[melvin]

Hi peepz, just need some help or advice on A mail server.
We are a small design company (+-15 eMacs) running Mac OS X 10.3
In just trialing things out, I have set up a web server and ftp server on one of the machines (Homer) and they work fine.

My boss has asked me to setup a mail server, so we can recieve emails straight into our machine and also send straight out from our machine.
Personally I dont see the advantages in setting up your own mail server, I see more down falls, spam, virus and just more things going wrong with it than a pop3 account with our isp which we use and works fine.
So if anyone can provide me with any advice on why a mail server is a good thing with our small design company it would be appreciated.

Now if we did go ahead and set up this mail server, there are a few questions, I have been on the forum searching up and down on articles on mail servers and have found heaps of info here but there are still few things that I dont understand, if anyone knows anything or any links that will help me, that would be cool.

1. Have been reading a mail server post in this forum(forgot the link) and one person said that if you are running a NAT Service (router config page is 192.168.1.254) you are not able to run a mail server, Is this true?

2. I understand how to setup the mail server, making a MX record at our domain registra pointing to Homer (server machine), but one thing I dont understand is once the mail arrives at homer how do you send it to the other machines on the network?

3. What happens if say u are rebooting Homer (server machine) and someone sends you an email does that bounce back to the sender or do I recieve the email next time I connect, if the answer is yes it will bounce back, is there a way to say have a backup plan?

4. My boss has a laptop so one are the factors is he often goes away and checks his email at a internet cafe or something like that, does he have to check his mail via the web or can he access his mail say through an email client like Apple Mail.

5. And if he does decide to check it via the web, and a new message comes in through his web browser, will it still come through to Homer (server machine) or not?

Yeah theres a bit, but if anyone can give me any advice would be appreciated
cheers

 

[Lycander]

1. Have been reading a mail server post in this forum(forgot the link) and one person said that if you are running a NAT Service (router config page is 192.168.1.254) you are not able to run a mail server, Is this true?

Your router should have port forwarding. That means you can specify what ports to forward incoming requests to a specific IP address. First, give "Homer" a static IP address below the number where DHCP starts. Setup port forwarding for inbound requests to that IP address. Port 25 for POP3, 110 for SMTP but just double check those port numbers online in case I goofed (it's 4:30 AM).

2. I understand how to setup the mail server, making a MX record at our domain registra pointing to Homer (server machine), but one thing I dont understand is once the mail arrives at homer how do you send it to the other machines on the network?

If your router/firewall is the gateway between the Internet connection and your LAN, then you first do step #1 above, then in your domain registrar point it to the IP of your Internect connection (WAN IP on the router). On the client side of things, you'd specify the POP3/SMTP server addresses in each mail client to point to Homer. Either by IP address or if you have a domain controller in your LAN use Homer's host name. A shortcut to this is editing the "hosts" file in /etc to map Homer's LAN IP address to a psuedo domain name like "mail.localnet.com" One way or another, you just have to tell each mail client to go to Homer for sending/receiving mail.

3. What happens if say u are rebooting Homer (server machine) and someone sends you an email does that bounce back to the sender or do I recieve the email next time I connect, if the answer is yes it will bounce back, is there a way to say have a backup plan?

When you're sending mail, you're talking directly to that box. If the mail server is not listening, no mail gets sent or received. Backup plan? Yes, have a physical backup server.

4. My boss has a laptop so one are the factors is he often goes away and checks his email at a internet cafe or something like that, does he have to check his mail via the web or can he access his mail say through an email client like Apple Mail.

Webmail requires a web-based frontend that usually just ties directly into POP3 backend, unless you're Hotmail. Once you put this server live and on the Internet, he can use it just the same as the mail server from your ISP.

5. And if he does decide to check it via the web, and a new message comes in through his web browser, will it still come through to Homer (server machine) or not?

That depends on the behavior of your webmail software. Webmail is something extra you have to setup, it doesn't come free with the core mail serving software.

Yeah theres a bit, but if anyone can give me any advice would be appreciated
cheers

My advice, just stick with your ISPs mail account. Better yet, buy a domain and cheap web hosting that'll give you enough POP accounts. For about $10 a month I got a domain name, 100 MB of web space and a ridiculous number of POP3 accounts that I'll never use all of. Oh, the web space and storage space used by your emails is one and the same with most hosting companies.

You may also want to investigate "groupware." I manage a Windows network at work and we've been thinking of setting up MS Exchange server. It basically acts like a mail server that your workgroup sends/receives from but you don't publish it out into the wild. It fetches emails from a specified POP server and stores it locally. Your client workstations in your office grabs mail from this particular Exchange server. There are open source alternatives that mimic the same functionality of Exchange Server, the name escapes me at the moment but do a search. I don't know if there's any such server software for Macs though. With this arrangement, you get to store mails locally as if you had your own mail server, but you get the bakcup and redundency of professional mail hosting from someone else.

I'm advising against hosting your own mail server in your office because: take my office for example. We pay the big bucks for a business class DSL hook up. In the last 4 years that I've worked there, we've only had a handful of down times from our ISP. Nothing to worry about, but I'd still rather have zero downtime especially if I'm doing web services.

If you're really serious about a do-it-yourself hosting solution to include web/ftp/email, then consider dedicated hosting of colocation. Right now my company has a colocated box for specific web apps, and a dedicated host (we rent the server) for email and our main company homepage. In both cases we have full control over the servers and root access so we can pretty much do whatever we want.

 

[garymum4d]

The solution I use is:-

I still use a POP3 account with my ISP but one Mac on my network is running Mac OSX SERVER. This has mail server software built in. I have set up user accounts for each employee on the server Mac ( with Mail enabled ). The server uses Mail.app to receive' all the mail from our ISP and I have set up rules to copy each employees mail to the relevant mailbox. all other Mac on the network are set to receive their mail from this server. This way they only get their own mail and not all the mail sent to the company. This can be POP or IMAP. I have also installed Postfix Enabler on all the Mac's so mail is sent by "Localhost". This way the mail server does not have to be online to send mail.
I have been running like this for a year and after a few set up problems it now runs sweet.
And what happens if the Server crashes! Do I loose any mail you may ask? No is the answer. Mail.app is set to delete mail from my ISP after 3 days. This gives plenty of time to fix the server and download the mail again.
Also if an employee deletes some mail by mistake. There is still a copy on the mail server because the rules copy the mail and NOT move it into the employees mail box. All I have to do is delete the downloaded mail every month or whenever the server gets low on HD space.

 

[ciacci]

Wonderful It's exactly the same things that I want on my lan:

I still use a POP3 account with my ISP but one Mac on my network is running Mac OSX SERVER....

It's possible to set-up this mailserver with a dynamic IP??
sorry but I'm a newbie on "server administration" I install on a machine a OS server version, but for now I use only the print server and AFP.

Please if possible, let me know the exact settings to put on mailserver to work like yours..

sorry for my terrible english, I'm Italian..

thanks and excuse me for this demand
ciao
matteo

matteo@creactive.it