A good free Mail Server ... and SAVE MY JOB...
 

I am a newly hired fairly computer savvy guy without a lot of server experience. My boss has a proprietary mail server that -- frankly -- sucks. Its old, has HUGE amounts of trouble with attachments, and needs to be replaced. My company is small, so my job involves many, many things--some technical, like our servers. I'm tasked with choosing a mail server -- a free one -- and I've narrowed it down to MailExchange since it has a very functional free version (I think). I've been thru the manual and it seems like it would be a good choice for an office with only 8 employees that has to host its own mail server (he insists). Any advice/opinions? The manual talks about an MX DNS address that I have to set up with my domain provider. Isn't that just the DNS that I can get when I lookup our domain with Network Solutions? I'd like to get this done and move on so I can get off on the right foot.

Thanks for your help.
Cheese

About the MX record: Your company has a domain (yourdomain.com) that you registered with networksolutions. When you registered, you told networksolutions which DNS servers had the original info about the domain (where the mail server, web server, etc. are) that's called the Start Of Authority (SOA). Now, on those servers (which you can see by doing a whois lookup on your domain), you have a domain file, that contains the IP address of your mail server. It's indicated by the MX name in the line. The MX record will have a host name, and there will be a host record (indicated with an A on the line), for the host's IP address. That IP has to be either: a) The Ip address of the mail server, if it's directly connected, or b) pointing at the outside address of your router, and your router does a passthrough to the internal ip address of your mail server.

hmm... right now he had it configured--I think-- so that it was pointing to the address of the firewall -- (thru the DMZ). It goes modem, firewall, router, etc, and I think that the firewall has a DNS setting. Am I wrong? This is a bit confusing for me because though I have basic home router experience, I've never set up a several hundred dollar hardware firewall, let alone a mail server at the same time.

Sounds like the router has an internal translation where it takes anything sent to mail.domain.com and/or e-mail related ports and routes it to a local IP. It's hard to give advice on that without knowing more specifics though.

As for the mail server, I'd suggest running sendmail under Linux. If it's not the most widely used mail server, it's certainly up there. qmail is gaining ground, but I think it's a tremendous pain in the ass to use in comparison for small networks.

Can't run linux in the office. My boss is married to the Microsoft OS, since he has a developer come in from time to time. On my own time, I'd like to learn to set up a server under linux for my own personal education, but it just ain't gonna fly in the office.

maybe these would help you:

http://www.snapfiles.com/Freeware/se...ailserver.html

http://www.nonags.com/nonags/servd32.html

Poke around freshmeat.net. Most of the projects are for posix systems, but there is a lot that will run on windows.

http://freshmeat.net/browse/33/

Here's a look at Yahoo's mail DNS setup, as an example:
Non-authoritative answer:
yahoo.com MX preference = 5, mail exchanger = mx4.mail.yahoo.com
yahoo.com MX preference = 1, mail exchanger = mx1.mail.yahoo.com
yahoo.com MX preference = 1, mail exchanger = mx2.mail.yahoo.com

mx4.mail.yahoo.com internet address = 66.218.86.198

I severely edited this, to make it simple: See the line with the MX in it? that's the MX record. Then, later in the DNS, you see the IP address. Now, on your domain, where's that address? Is it on the firewall's exterior, or on the server itself?

You got the networksolutions part correct, that's where the servers that have those MX records are, if you need to edit them, which you probably will, if you change the mail server around. If the IP/Names are familiar, then you may own those servers. If not, then you may outsource it to your isp. check the domain on those DNS servers, and see if it's yours or someone elses.

I guess I screwed up. The program I was looking at was called Mail Enable, not Xpress. Basically, I like it because it gives you an unlimited # of users. Imail looks nice but only lets you set up 10. We're around that number now, just for employee addreses--we need room for help@domain.com and company@domain.com, etc.

Now, only outbound mail has to reference the DNS, right?

As for the servers, I'm pretty sure we own them. We have like 5 ips, 2 of which I believe are for DNS. We host our own web and mail server, so I have these addresses.

I appreciate the link for all of the free server tools--anyone wanna make a reccomendation for a company that should soon be expanding to about 10 employees? We don't necessarily NEED webmail, and we don't NEED virus integration (but wouldn't mind it since right now we don't have antivirus on the server--only the client machines). We NEED some sort of spam protection. Definitely.

The outbound mail server needs SOME dns, but only to translate the domain name of the mail to the destination IP. Inbound mail is going to need to know an IP address to talk to to get the mail to you. That's what the MX record does, it tells someone else's mail server what IP to connect to, to get the mail TO you.

Thanks guys. So anyone have a favorite free server?

postfix on freebsd baby