Email Server

[CCM]

Anyone have any experience setting up an email server?  I work at a small company and we currently run our own email server to provide email for ourselves and a few clients.  Probably a total of about 50 email accounts.

Up to now we have been running Mercury(which is free) on a Windows box.  The computer has been acting up lately and we are looking into upgrading the mail server. 

Here are some of the things we are looking for:

Windows platform (no one here is very proficient in Unix/Linux)
Web Mail
Good spam/virus protection
Need to receive mail for multiple domains.


We were considering setting up an exchange server, but our budget is rather small, probably around $1000 to $1500 max.

Does anyone have any experience with this that can give us some ideas where to start?


Thanks!

[drventure]

Exchange would do quite well, I'd imagine, in that scenario. I ran a copy for years on a server at home to handle all my email, mostly as practice for administering an exchange server. That was several versions ago, and it was a bit of a pain in the ass.

The latest versions are much nicer to admin from what I hear.

But exchanges webmail has always been a bit anemic.

I also ran Mercury, but it never seemed stable for me.

You might want to have a look here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mail_servers

There's tons of options out there.

Do they explicitly NOT want to go with a hosted solution (like GMAIL)?

[wp34]

+1 for Exchange.

There are companies that will host Exchange for you as well.  They can take care of all the spam filtering, backups and eDiscovery compliance for you.  You should still be able to connect with Outlook using a hosted setup.

[patrickl]

I use Allardsofts mailserver appliance for my company.

It's a super easy install in a VMWare environment. Costs $99 for a full license, but it's free for small use.

http://www.allardsoft.com/mailserver

You work the settings on a website, so the underlying OS is not really an issue. Just install VMware and install the virtual machine.

[ark_ader]

Buy Windows Small Business Server 2003.

[CCM]

Thanks for all the replies...  I'll take a look at all of the options suggested here.

A few things:

My boss is intent on keeping the new server in-house, so no hosted solution such as gmail.

Webmail seems to be on top of the wish list from our clients, so any server I go with needs to have decent webmail capabilities.

[CCM]

Buy Windows Small Business Server 2003.

Is there a reason (other than maybe price) to go with Windows Small Business Server 2003 rather than 2008?

[SteveJ34]

If you want a robust server that by its original design was designed to be a cost effective alternative to Exchange, MDaemon from www.altn.com is worth a look.

It is full featured with tiered pricing based on the number of accounts you need.

[Santoro]

I used MDaemon for many years for family email.  I recently moved to Google Apps.

[Jakobud]

Have you considered using Google Apps?  For 50+ employees you'll have to do the pay version, which is $50 per employee per year.  If you have less than 50 employees you can go with the free 'standard' route.   $50 per user might sound like a lot of money, but that cost is really not that high if you consider the following:

99.9% uptime
Hosted and supported completely by Google
No server or software for you or your IT staff to monitor/backup/service/upgrade/worry about
Dead simple to use

If you are dead set on going with something that is completely free, I'd use Zimbra on a Linux server.  We currently run it at our company (15 employees) but we are in the process of migrating to Google Apps at the moment for the above mentioned reasons.