Microsoft Exchange as a Middle Man

[ICBM]

I had a question about Microsoft Exchange. We currently have a pop email provider with limited inbox space for our users. What I would like to do is setup an exchange server to act as a middle man, so to speak, and send/recieve for all our accounts. I would then like all of our users to login to the exchange server for all their email, which would also be backed up, and we could use an imap protocol then! I guess what I am asking is this possible? We already have an Exchange license which we currently aren't using, so this would save us money, where the alternative would be paying more to our email provider for larger inboxes. I appreciate any thought/ideas on this subject. Thanks alot.

 

[Genx87]

If you are going to go through all that trouble why not just get rid of your pop provider and use exchange as your email service?

 

[SViper]

Originally posted by: Genx87
If you are going to go through all that trouble why not just get rid of your pop provider and use exchange as your email service?

QFT. If you use exchange as the e-mail service, everyone will always have access to their e-mail with an internet connection if you setup outlook web access.

 

[ICBM]

Well that would be ideal, but our internet service here is NOT reliable. So having the pop provider gives us that extra reliability, without having to worry about changing around a bunch of stuff. How much trouble is it to setup an exchange server? Is it even possible to do what I want?

 

[ICBM]

I got ya SViper, that was one of the things I liked. We rarely have people check email when they are outside the office, but if they need to they can just enter in our IP, or we ran register another domain name and pull up the outlook web access. This was another feature I really liked about exchange. This is not my main concern though, its a nice perk though. I basically want to have all the email located on our server, where it is backed up regularly, and we don't have to worry about having the pop server mailboxes being filled up.

 

[SViper]

Originally posted by: ICBM
I got ya SViper, that was one of the things I liked. We rarely have people check email when they are outside the office, but if they need to they can just enter in our IP, or we ran register another domain name and pull up the outlook web access. This was another feature I really liked about exchange. This is not my main concern though, its a nice perk though. I basically want to have all the email located on our server, where it is backed up regularly, and we don't have to worry about having the pop server mailboxes being filled up.

If that's what you want, then MS Exchange is exactly the solution you need. You just have to enter the domain name in an internet browser (i.e. http://yourdomainhere.net/mail/exchange). You will then authenticate with your domain controller and have to type in your network username and password. It's not too hard too difficult to setup. You can also have OMA (outlook mobile access) setup with exchange if any of your clients have PDA's and want to access their e-mail on that.

I am a proponent of exchange because that's what I have setup at work. If you have any questions about it, just let me know.

Edit: Also, with exchange, clients never download their e-mail to their computers. E-mails are all stored on the server and you can do whatever you want with them (back them up, delete certain messages, etc.).

 

[ICBM]

Hey SViper thanks for the response. I just have one last question before I begin setting up a testbed to try this out. Will Exchange have a way to login to everyone's pop accounts and then forward that mail to their exchange accounts? Thanks again for the all the help and ideas!

 

[HeroOfPellinor]

Originally posted by: ICBM
Hey SViper thanks for the response. I just have one last question before I begin setting up a testbed to try this out. Will Exchange have a way to login to everyone's pop accounts and then forward that mail to their exchange accounts? Thanks again for the all the help and ideas!

I'm pretty sure so long as you set the delivery location to their exchange account that it will work.

 

[SViper]

Originally posted by: ICBM
Hey SViper thanks for the response. I just have one last question before I begin setting up a testbed to try this out. Will Exchange have a way to login to everyone's pop accounts and then forward that mail to their exchange accounts? Thanks again for the all the help and ideas!

That is a good question. You can try what HeroOfPellinor says, but I don't know the answer to that one. When we setup the new exchange server, we were just migrating from an older version of exchange.

I think you can have both an exchange and POP3 e-mail account running side-by-side and be able to transfer e-mails between them. Don't take my word for it though as I only work with an exchange server at work.

 

[ICBM]

I will give it a try on a test server before I set it up live. Thanks for the response and input guys. This helps me out alot.

 

[tranceport]

You need to get rid of the pop service. Most SMTP ( email protocol ) servers have built in settings to retry delivery in the event a destination SMTP server is down. You can also use services from companies like postini and ironport to scan your incoming mail for viruses and spam and then deliver it to you. In the event your mail server is not reachable these companies will spool your mail for you until your mail server comes back up.

Exchange is featurefull and expensive. I would hate to see you not get the most bang for your buck, but if it fits your business then do what you have to.

 

[SViper]

How many users do you have? Depending on how many users you have, you will have to have a lot of space on hand for mailboxes. We have ~325 users, but unfortunately we don't have any mailbox size limits in place. I think our mailbox store is sitting at ~80GB right now, with the growth about 10-15GB/year, but we have 3TB allocated for it.

 

[ICBM]

We only have around 20 users, so we aren't really concerned about mailboxes taking up too much space.

 

[tranceport]

Originally posted by: SViper
How many users do you have? Depending on how many users you have, you will have to have a lot of space on hand for mailboxes. We have ~325 users, but unfortunately we don't have any mailbox size limits in place. I think our mailbox store is sitting at ~80GB right now, with the growth about 10-15GB/year, but we have 3TB allocated for it.

Why would you allocate 3 TB for your 80 GB information store? You have allocated space for the next 200 years at your projected growth rate? Now I am unable to take anything you say seriously...

 

[SViper]

We don't exactly have it all allocated for that at the moment. We use the leftover space for other things as well (such as our server backups). If need be, we can allocate up to 3TB.

 

[tranceport]

Originally posted by: SViper
We don't exactly have it all allocated for that at the moment. We use the leftover space for other things as well (such as our server backups). If need be, we can allocate up to 3TB.

I will now consider things you say to be possibly serious.

 

[SViper]

Originally posted by: tranceport

Originally posted by: SViper
We don't exactly have it all allocated for that at the moment. We use the leftover space for other things as well (such as our server backups). If need be, we can allocate up to 3TB.

I will now consider things you say to be possibly serious.

lol. It was my fault for not explaining things clearly.

 

[Mutilator]

Sounds like what you're looking for is something like this.

 

[ICBM]

Mutilator that is EXACTLY the piece of information I was looking for. Thanks and thanks to everyone for their input.

 

[HeroOfPellinor]

Originally posted by: Mutilator
Sounds like what you're looking for is something like this.

That's just what I said damn it.

 

[ICBM]

Yeah, but Mutilator had the source to back it up

I have one last question about Exchange in general, and I am sure its a stupid one. The exchange server 2003 with 5 Clients, does this 5 clients number mean we can only have 5 email addresses? I am still trying to learn how all this server licensing works. Thanks.

 

[aceO07]

I've done the same thing as you did. Setting up Exchange to be the email server was not a good solution for us due to time constraints.

Much nicer after getting Exchange up as a proxy instead of using using our isp provided email server. We also have Blackberry Enterprise Server working with it too now.

It's not too hard to set up initially. You need to set up the connector and this means you need to get everybody to put in their pop password, unless you know it already.

The follow article was helpful for me: 319759 from MS website. I set up Exchange in steps, so some people in our email domain weren't using Exchange yet and Exchange would just tell the sender that the recipient didn't exist if they weren't in the Exchange system.

edit: In regards to your license question, I don't have an answer. You can just try it and it will yell at you if you go over the limit. I would just assume it's limited to the number of clients. Just check the event log for warning.

 

[Czar]

5 clients only mean you have 5 email acounts, but behind those email accounts you can have lots and lots of email addressses (all going to the same account)

I think

microsoft lisensing is a maze no one knows their way around