What Mail Server to Choose?

[b4u]

Hi,

I'm currently in the process of choosing an email server for a small/medium company. Looking at some products, I do find:


1# Mercury Mail Transport System

Price:

Free!

Advantages:

Free, free, and best of all ... free.

Well, I installed it into a test environment, and it really worked great! The modular config of the product made it easy to install, configure and even use an external SMTP server (from my ISP) to relay email deliveries.

Disadvantages:

I don't really know how it would coope with SPAM and VIRUS. Seems to me it doesn't have any way of controlling/checking these everyday nightmares ... oh, and no email quota limit ... so a user could send a 100Mb email


2# Merak Mail Server

Price:
Merak Mail Server Professional Suite - $860
Merak Mail Server Standard Suite - $380
Merak Mail Server Lite Suite - $75
(Licenses)

Professional Suite:
Professional version is most advanced mail server
dedicated to Corporates, ISPs and web developers.
Utilizes ODBC, high speed memory mode, advanced
features and other sophisticated tools.

Standard Suite:
Standard version is an affordable solution for medium
sized businesses, educational and government. It is
most suitable for all standard installations with
unlimited domains and users.

Lite Suite:
Lite version is an entry level solution for SOHO
(small office and home users), however it
includes all sophisticated features of the Standard
version and the only difference is a single domain
operation and add-on user license policy.

Advantages:

Price is kind of acceptible, at least the Lite Suite .

I've tried the Professional, and the package seemed very robust. It has SPAM and VIRUS control, so it will help to control the most problems with today's email.

It can have multiple domains, though I'm planning to have only one, so Professional would be too much power not to be used.

Disadvantages:

Well, it seems a good package, although I'm not sure whether the SPAM and VIRUS tools really work good. But if they are there, and can be updated online, then they should work.

The price. Well, it's way better then Exchange 2003 price, but still worse than Mercury.


3# Exchange Server 2003

Price:
Enterprise - $6,999.00 :Q :Q
Standard - $1,299.00 :Q
You must be joking right? Must be a typo micro$oft ... damn!
(Product Search with Prices)

Advantages:

Probably a great software, but don't really know it. It could potentially be easy to configure to the domain users.

Disadvantages:

Price! Should I bother going deep into any other disadvantage?

Well, I don't really know the product ... but I was interested in some "independent from OS" software ... and exchange seems one of those products that will stick glued into the OS ... if it brings any problem, then it's a pain! (complete OS reinstall anyone?) That's my thoughts about it.



And here I am, choosing a package to handle my emails. I don't know of any other good packages around (free of payed ones), so you can throw some of them if you know more ...

So do you have any opinion on these or other software around? The thing that worries me about Mercury is the lack of SPAM and VIRUS control features ... at least it seems to me that way, unless there are other plugins around.

 

[Kilrsat]

We use Rockliffe MailSite - http://www.rockliffe.com/

You'd probably want MailSite SE for small/medium businesses - http://www.rockliffe.com/Products/MailS...E/mailsite-se-windows-email-server.asp

There's a free evaluation version, but it does cost $ (although there are various pricing tiers). It has anti-virus and anti-spam options, and the ability to use the same user names/passwords as your Windows domain.

 

[Drakkon]

if your small/medium company is looking to grow and already is running a Windows Server 2003 environment then I'd say exchange 2003 is the way to go. Not only does it provide email ability but company wide contact and scheduling through outlook along wiht a lot of other possible abilities. Exchange is more of a solution if your company wants a greater ability to communicate and keep track, if your just looking for an email solution then probobly somehting as simple as Mercury would do I would imagine,

It really is up to how much your company is willing to spend, whenever i have a decision point like this when it comes down to costing the company free or thousands i just go to the guy in charge, ask him what he wants to do, provide him with the advantages/disadvantages as you have here, and 99% of the time hes going to pay for the most expensive package cause it provides the most power, the most security, and the most familiar name

 

[HeroOfPellinor]

Remember that Exchange 2003 Standard has a 16GB limit. It won't affect small companies, but it's something to consider.

 

[Modeps]

Postfix

 

[Czar]

Originally posted by: HeroOfPellinor
Remember that Exchange 2003 Standard has a 16GB limit. It won't affect small companies, but it's something to consider.

on the database,
the malbox database can reach max 16gb in size, for the enterprise version its 16tb
public folders can reach 16gb as well



how many users will it be serving?

 

[Czar]

Originally posted by: Drakkon
if your small/medium company is looking to grow and already is running a Windows Server 2003 environment then I'd say exchange 2003 is the way to go. Not only does it provide email ability but company wide contact and scheduling through outlook along wiht a lot of other possible abilities. Exchange is more of a solution if your company wants a greater ability to communicate and keep track, if your just looking for an email solution then probobly somehting as simple as Mercury would do I would imagine,

It really is up to how much your company is willing to spend, whenever i have a decision point like this when it comes down to costing the company free or thousands i just go to the guy in charge, ask him what he wants to do, provide him with the advantages/disadvantages as you have here, and 99% of the time hes going to pay for the most expensive package cause it provides the most power, the most security, and the most familiar name

also administrators who dont know much about computers tend to not trust free software, automaticly assume that the more it costs the better it is

 

[HeroOfPellinor]

Originally posted by: Czar
also administrators who dont know much about computers tend to not trust free software, automaticly assume that the more it costs the better it is

Paid professional on-demand support is another appealing factor.

 

[Drakkon]

Originally posted by: HeroOfPellinor

Originally posted by: Czar
also administrators who dont know much about computers tend to not trust free software, automaticly assume that the more it costs the better it is

Paid professional on-demand support is another appealing factor.

that and a pretty interface .
Its been too many times i've come to boss with "well you could either use this dos command or buy this $30 program that does the same thing that looks pretty..." and his inevitabile response is "well if it looks pretty it MUST be better" :roll:

 

[JackMDS]

I do not know what small/Medium means and what is the importance of email for the company.

It always seems to me odd that No one thing twice when paying few hundreds $$$ for a desk, but to buy software (wow G-d forbid if it is not free). Some time I wonder if in such cases the problem is the company finance or the ?Computer Maven? that provides the service.

If the company can do with one domain and it has less than 75 computers, a combo of Windows SBS 2003 and exchange is not as Expensive.

:sun:

P.S. Company owners do not post on Computer BBSs.
Do you know how many of them got stuck with solutions that were Good as long as the original installer was around. Then the Installer went to school/Got married/move to other part of the country/ etc. , and the business paid dearly for the Free Software.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: HeroOfPellinor

Originally posted by: Czar
also administrators who dont know much about computers tend to not trust free software, automaticly assume that the more it costs the better it is

Paid professional on-demand support is another appealing factor.

Sendmail.com offers support for sendmail, THE standard in MTAs.

 

[Nothinman]

Paid professional on-demand support is another appealing factor.

You can pay someone like IBM or Redhat to support pretty much anything on Linux that you want and you won't have to deal with artificial limits that only serve to inflate licensing costs.

 

[DaveSimmons]

In addition to a mail server, I'd suggest paying for mail filtering from www.SpamStopsHere.com. We've been using them at work for about a month with excellent results.

Read the details at the site, but they use a constantly-updated database of email content for filtering (spam URLs and phone numbers) that for us is cutting over 98% of our spam with 0 false positives.

They also offer to use spam blacklists as a supplement, but we get a lot of false positives from spamcop and spamhaus blacklists.

 

[Nothinman]

Recently I setup SpamAssassin, that combined with Postfix RBL checking takes care of nearly all of my spam. I think 5 made it through in the past 2 weeks and I fed them to sa-learn so hopefully they won't next time. Looking at my local mailgraphs it seems that ~115 spam messages have been stopped in the past 7 days out of a total of 2437 messages received.

 

[b4u]

Originally posted by: Czar

how many users will it be serving?

This is a small/medium company. Small because ... well it is a small one , and Medium because we (me as IT responsible and people that really make the works in the company) are working together to make the company grow. And as we all know, a company to grow needs to move into the digital area computers rock and do great things for a company!

Well, we're talking about 10 users (5 for individual users, another 5 for email serving other purposes).

Originally posted by: Czar
also administrators who dont know much about computers tend to not trust free software, automaticly assume that the more it costs the better it is

This is not the case. I pretty much like free software, as long as they don't bring security holes on them. For that, I use the great database of google and forum browsing to gather info before relying a service on non-relyable free software.

My rule of tumb is: Get the software -> Install in on a test environment -> Mess with it for a while -> Search for problems online, share knowledge about the product -> Use it in a production environment. Well, you know what I mean


Exchange can really be a gerat tool ... in my company (not this small/medium, but the main one I work for), we have exchange installed and it seems a great tool ... but charging that much money is not viable for this small company I'm helping.

The main purpose of the software will be sending/receiving emails. We want to be able to create accounts at will, and have some control about them (like maximum mail size, for instance, and webmail is a neat extra, but not necessarilly a must).

 

[Czar]

go with win2003 sbs and exchange standard, not that expensive and works great, probably very easy to get a deal for both
or you can go with the free one and when the time comes upgrade to exchange

network software isnt cheap
software cost, hardware cost, running cost, all adds up regardless what package you pick, but since you are so few right now than the free one and some spare computer can do the job pretty well, but as soon as you grow you will want to upgrade to something better