Email System and exchange?
 

What would the best way to set up an email server, software wise? Would exchange work? and if can exchange produce a page for account creations or do I have to go in each time to add a user? I mainly is curious how I would set up something like yahoo mail or any other email provider.

I wouldn't recommend an Exchange Server for a "run of the mill" email box. It's a big system and IMO not worth the trouble unless you're installing one in a business.

What do you need the email server to do?

I was just curious on what type of system setup they would have to run an email server, or mill. Personally, I was thinking about someone day, setting up one and running it but it was more just curiosity on how they do it.

postfix+cyrus is the way to go. It has a bit steep learning curve (on the cyrus side, postfix is easy) but it's the best you can get.

I won't go into details, but if you can build one with those you will understand how email works and what is important.

FYI, I've desingned, implemented, integrated and debugged e-mail systems that have to scale to hundreds of thousands of users. Cyrus+postfix does the trick without any hiccups and is easy to support. (of course in large systems you scale this up but basically...)

Alright, thanks for the information.

You could use exchange if you wanted to (I wouldn't reccommend it for what you want to do).

Some things to remember with exchange:

You can set up the mailbox when you set up the user account with exchange 2000 or newer. (Yes, I said user account, exchange is tied to user accounts as it is designed as a corporate mail system) This means everyone who wanted an email address would need to be set up as a user on your network.

You must have a license for every user who connects to the mail server. Licenses are not for concurrent connections, they are for total connections.

You might want to look at Eudora WorldMail server. It's a basic POP/SMTP server, and It's probably going to be cheaper than Exchange.

Microsoft server products are meant for corporate (enterprise) use. They're easy to implement for small workgroups (the servers at least) but when you go with Active Directory and start adding things like Exchange, you're talking about a lot of configuration.

The Small Business Server bundles it with the OS, however it doesn't make it any less complex. The question is, how much time do you have and does it help you in the long run?

we use [<a target="_blank" href="http://www.lifewithqmail.com">qmail</a>] + linux.....fast, light, and secure